THE SPELL OF EGYPT 



THE SPELL OF EGYPT 



BY 

ROBERT HICHENS 

AUTHOR OF "THE GARDEN OF ALLAH," ETC. 




NEW YORK 
THE CENTURY CO. 
1911 




First Edition issued under the title 
of "Egypt and Its Monuments.** 
Illustrated by Jules Gu/rin. 



Copyright, 1908, by 
The Century Co. 




CONTENTS 



I 

THE PYRAMIDS 

II 

THE SPHINX . 

Ill 

SAKKARA .... 

IV 

ABYDOS .... 



vi CONTENTS 

PAGE 

V 

THE NH,£ 45 

VI 

DEND3RAH ....... 53 

VII 

KARNAK 67 

VIII 

LUXOR . 4 , 89 

IX 

COLOSSI OF MUMNON .... IO5 

X 

MEDINET-ABU II9 



CONTENTS 



vii 



PAGE 

XI 

THE} RAM3SS3UM I3I 

XII 

DEIR-EX-BAHARI . . . .. . . I45 

XIII 

the tombs of the; kings . . . 161 

XIV 

EDFU I69 

XV 

KOM OMBOS . . ., . 189 

XVI 



phil^e 



203 



viii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

XVII 

" pharaoh's bed " 217 

XVIII 

OIvD CAIRO 239 



THE PYRAMIDS 



J 



1 



THE PYRAMIDS 

Why do you come to Egypt? Do you 
come to gain a dream, or to regain lost 
dreams of old; to gild your life with 
the drowsy gold of romance, to lose a 
creeping sorrow, to forget that too 
many of your hours are sullen, grey, 
bereft? What do you wish of Egypt? 

The Sphinx will not ask you, will not 
care. The Pyramids, lifting their un- 
numbered stones to the clear and wonder- 
ful skies, have held, still hold, their se- 
crets; but they do not seek for yours. 
The terrific temples, the hot, mysterious 
tombs, odorous of the dead desires of 
men, crouching in and under the immeas- 
urable sands, will mock you with their 

3 



4 



THE PYRAMIDS 



brooding silence, with their dim and som- 
bre repose. The brown children of the 
Nile, the toilers who sing their antique 
songs by the shadoof and the sakieh, the 
dragomans, the smiling goblin merchants, 
the Bedouins who lead your camel into 
the pale recesses of the dunes — these will 
not trouble themselves about your deep 
desires, your perhaps yearning hunger of 
the heart and the imagination. 

Yet Egypt is not unresponsive. 

I came back to her with dread, after 
fourteen years of absence — years filled 
for me with the rumors of her changes. 
And on the very day of my arrival she 
calmly reassured me. She told me in her 
supremely magical way that all was well 
with her. She taught me once more a les- 
son I had not quite forgotten, but that I 
was glad to learn again — the lesson that 
Egypt owes her most subtle, most inner 
beauty to Kheper, although she owes her 
marvels to men ; that when he created the 
sun which shines upon her, he gave her 



THE PYRAMIDS 



the lustre of her life, and that those who 
come to her must be sun-worshippers if 
they would truly and intimately under- 
stand the treasure of romance that lies 
heaped within her bosom. 

Thoth, says the old legend, travelled in 
the Boat of the Sun. If you would love 
Egypt rightly, you r too, must be a travel- 
ler in that bark. You must^ not fear to 
steep yourself in the mystery of gold, in 
the mystery of heat, in the mystery of 
silence that seems softly showered out of 
the sun. The sacred white lotus must 
be your emblem, and Horus, the hawk- 
headed, merged in Ra, your special 
deity. Scarcely had I set foot once more 
in Egypt before Thoth lifted me into the 
Boat of the Sun and soothed my fears to 
sleep. 

I arrived in Cairo. I saw new and 
vast hotels; I saw crowded streets; bril- 
liant shops; English officials driving im- 
portantly in victorias, surely to pay dread- 
ful calls of ceremony; women in gigantic 



6 THE PYRAMIDS 



hats, with Niagaras of veil, waving white 
gloves as they talked of — I guess — the 
latest Cairene scandal. I perceived on the 
right hand and on the left waiters created 
in Switzerland, hall porters made in Ger- 
many, Levantine touts, determined Jews 
holding false antiquities in their lean fin- 
gers, an English Baptist minister, in a 
white helmet, drinking chocolate on a ter- 
race, with a guide-book in one fist, a 
ticket to visit monuments in the other. I 
heard Scottish soldiers playing, " I'll be 
in Scotland before ye ! " and something 
within me, a lurking hope, I suppose, 
seemed to founder and collapse — but only 
for a moment. It was after four in the 
afternoon. Soon day would be declining. 
And I seemed to remember that the de- 
cline of day in Egypt had moved me long 
ago — moved me as few, rare things have 
ever done. Within half an hour I was 
alone, far up the long road — -Ismail's 
road — that leads from the suburbs of 
Cairo to the Pyramids. And then Egypt 



THE PYRAMIDS 7 



took me like a child by the hand and re- 
assured me. 

It was the first week of November, high 
Nile had not subsided, and all the land 
here, between the river and the sand 
where the Sphinx keeps watch, was hid- 
den beneath the vast and tranquil waters 
of what seemed a tideless sea — a sea 
fringed with dense masses of date-palms, 
girdled in the far distance by palm-trees 
that looked almost black, broken by low 
and tiny islands on which palm-trees kept 
the white and the brown houses in their 
feathery embrace. Above these isolated 
houses pigeons circled. In the distance 
the lateen sails of boats glided, sometimes 
behind the palms, coming into view, van- 
ishing, mysteriously reappearing among 
their narrow trunks. Here and there a 
living thing moved slowly, wading home- 
ward through this sea: a camel from the 
sands of Ghizeh, a buffalo, two donkeys, 
followed by boys who held with brown 
hands their dark blue skirts near their 



8 THE PYRAMIDS 



faces, a Bedouin leaning forward upon 
the neck of his quickly stepping horse. 
At one moment I seemed to look upon the 
lagoons of Venice, a watery vision full of 
a glassy calm. Then the palm-trees in 
the water, and growing to its edge, the 
pale sands that, far as the eyes could see, 
from Ghizeh to Sakkara and beyond, 
fringed it toward the west, made me think 
of the Pacific, of palmy islands, of a para- 
dise where men grow drowsy in well- 
being, and dream away the years. And 
then I looked still farther, beyond the 
pallid line of the sands, and I saw a Pyra- 
mid of gold, the wonder Khufu had built. 
As a golden wonder it saluted me after 
all my years of absence. Later I was to 
see it grey as grey sands, sulphur color 
in the afternoon from very near at hand, 
black as a monument draped in funereal 
velvet for a mourning under the stars at 
night, white as a monstrous marble tomb 
soon after dawn from the sand-dunes be- 
tween it and Sakkara. But as a golden 



THE PYRAMIDS 9 

thing it greeted me, as a golden miracle 
I shall remember it. 

Slowly the sun went down. The sec- 
ond Pyramid seemed also made of gold. 
Drowsily splendid it and its greater 
brother looked set on the golden sands be- 
neath the golden sky. And now the gold 
came travelling down from the desert to 
the water, turning it surely to a wine like 
the wine of gold that flowed down Midas's 
throat ; then, as the magic grew, to a Pac- 
tolus, and at last to a great surface that 
resembled golden ice, hard, glittering, un- 
broken by any ruffling wave. The islands 
rising from this golden ice were jet black, 
the houses black, the palms and their shad- 
ows that fell upon the marvel black. 
Black were the birds that flew low from 
roof to roof, black the wading camels, 
black the meeting leaves of the tall leb- 
bek-trees that formed a tunnel from where 
I stood to Mena House. And presently 
a huge black Pyramid lay supine on the 
gold, and near it a shadowy brother 



io THE PYRAMIDS 



seemed more humble than it, but scarcely 
less mysterious. The gold deepened, 
glowed more fiercely. In the sky above 
the Pyramids hung tiny cloud wreaths of 
rose red, delicate and airy as the gossa- 
mers of Tunis. As I turned, far off in 
Cairo I saw the first lights glittering 
across the fields of doura, silvery white, 
like diamonds. But the silver did not call 
me. My imagination was held captive by 
the gold. I was summoned by the gold, 
and I went on, under the black lebbek- 
trees, on Ismail's road, toward it. And I 
dwelt in it many days. 

The wonders of Egypt man has made 
seem to increase in stature before the 
spirits' eyes as man learns to know them 
better, to tower up ever higher till the im- 
agination is almost stricken by their loom- 
ing greatness. Climb the Great Pyramid, 
spend a day with Abou on its summit, 
come down, penetrate into its recesses, 
stand in the king's chamber, listen to the 
silence there, feel it with your hands — is 



THE PYRAMIDS 



ii 



it not tangible in this hot fastness of in- 
corruptible death? — creep, like the sur- 
reptitious midget you feel yourself to be, 
up those long and steep inclines of pol- 
ished stone, watching the gloomy dark- 
ness of the narrow walls, the far-off pin- 
point of light borne by the Bedouin who 
guides you, hear the twitter of the bats 
that have their dwelling in this monstrous 
gloom that man has made to shelter the 
thing whose ambition could never be em- 
balmed, though that, of all qualities, 
should have been given here, in the land 
it dowered, a life perpetual. Now you 
know the Great Pyramid. You know 
that you can climb it, that you can enter 
it. You have seen it from all sides, under 
all aspects. It is familiar to you. 

No, it can never be that. With its 
more wonderful comrade, the Sphinx, it 
has the power peculiar, so it seems to me, 
to certain of the rock and stone monu- 
ments of Egypt, of holding itself ever 
aloof, almost like the soul of man which 



12 THE PYRAMIDS 



can retreat at will, like the Bedouin re- 
treating from you into the blackness of 
the Pyramid, far up, or far down, where 
the pursuing stranger, unaided, cannot 
follow. 



THE SPHINX 



II 



THE SPHINX 

One day at sunset I saw a bird trying to 
play with the Sphinx — a bird like a swal- 
low, but with a ruddy brown on its breast, 
a gleam of blue somewhere on its wings. 
When I came to the edge of the sand ba- 
sin where perhaps Khufu saw it lying 
nearly four thousand years before the 
birth of Christ, the Sphinx and the bird 
were quite alone. The bird flew near the 
Sphinx, whimsically turning this way and 
that, flying now low, now high, but ever 
returning to the magnet which drew it, 
which held it, from which it surely longed 
to extract some sign of recognition. It 
twittered, it poised itself in the golden air, 
with its bright eyes fixed upon those eyes 
15 



i6 



THE SPHINX 



of stone which gazed beyond it, beyond 
the land of Egypt, beyond the world of 
men, beyond the centre of the sun to the 
last verges of eternity. And presently 
it alighted on the head of the Sphinx, then 
on its ear, then on its breast; and over 
the breast it tripped jerkily, with tiny, 
elastic steps, looking upward, its whole 
body quivering apparently with a desire 
for comprehension — a desire for some 
manifestation of friendship. Then sud- 
denly it spread its wings, and, straight as 
an arrow, it flew away over the sands and 
the waters toward the doura-fields and 
Cairo. 

And the sunset waned, and the after- 
glow flamed and faded, and the clear, soft 
African night fell. The pilgrims who 
day by day visit the Sphinx, like the bird, 
had gone back to Cairo. They had come, 
as the bird had come ; as those who have 
conquered Egypt came; as the Greeks 
came, Alexander of Macedon, and the 
Ptolemies; as the Romans came; as the 



THE SPHINX 



17 



Mamelukes, the Turks, the French, the 
English came. 

They had come — and gone. 

And that enormous face, with the stains 
of stormy red still adhering to its cheeks, 
grew dark as the darkness closed in, 
turned brown as a fellah's face, as the 
face of that fellah who whispered his se- 
cret in the Sphinx's ear, but learnt no se- 
cret in return; turned black almost as a 
Nubian's face. The night accentuated its 
appearance of terrible repose, of super- 
human indifference to whatever might be- 
fall. In the night I seemed to hear the 
footsteps of the dead — of all the dead 
warriors and the steeds they rode, defiling 
over the sand before the unconquerable 
thing they perhaps thought that they had 
conquered. At last the footsteps died 
away. There was a silence. Then, com- 
ing down from the Great Pyramid, surely 
I heard the light patter of a donkey's feet. 
They went to the Sphinx and ceased. The 
silence was profound. And I remembered 



i8 



THE SPHINX 



the legend that Mary, Joseph, and the 
Holy Child once halted here on their long 
journey, and that Mary laid the tired 
Christ between the paws of the Sphinx 
to sleep. Yet even of the Christ the soul 
within that body could take no heed at all. 

It is, I think, one of the most astound- 
ing facts in the history of man that a 
man was able to contain within his mind, 
to conceive, the conception of the Sphinx. 
That he could carry it out in the stone is 
amazing. But how much more amazing 
it is that before there was the Sphinx he 
was able to see it with his imagination! 
One may criticise the Sphinx. One may 
say impertinent things that are true about 
it : that seen from behind at a distance its 
head looks like an enormous mushroom 
growing in the sand, that its cheeks are 
swelled inordinately, that its thick-lipped 
mouth is legal, that from certain places it 
bears a resemblance to a prize bull-dog. 
All this does not matter at all. What 
does matter is that into the conception and 



THE SPHINX 



19 



execution of the Sphinx has been poured 
a supreme imaginative power. He who 
created it looked beyond Egypt, beyond 
the life of man. He grasped the concep- 
tion of Eternity, and realized the noth- 
ingness of Time, and he rendered it in 
stone. 

I can imagine the most determined athe- 
ist looking at the Sphinx and, in a flash, 
not merely believing, but feeling that he 
had before him proof of the life of the 
soul beyond the grave, of the life of the 
soul of Khufu beyond the tomb of his 
Pyramid. Always as you return to the 
Sphinx you wonder at it more, you adore 
more strangely its repose, you steep your- 
self more intimately in the aloof peace 
that seems to emanate from it as light 
emanates from the sun. And as you look 
on it at last perhaps you understand the 
infinite; you understand where is the 
bourne to which the finite flows with all 
its greatness, as the great Nile flows from 
beyond Victoria Nyanza to the sea. 



20 



THE SPHINX 



And as the wonder of the Sphinx takes 
possession of you gradually, so gradually 
do you learn to feel the majesty of the 
Pyramids of Ghizeh. Unlike the Step 
Pyramid of Sakkara, which, even when 
one is near it, looks like a small mountain, 
part of the land on which it rests, the 
Pyramids of Ghizeh look what they are 
— artificial excrescences, invented and 
carried out by man, expressions of man's 
greatness. Exquisite as they are as feat- 
ures of the drowsy golden landscape at 
the setting of the sun, I think they look 
most wonderful at night, when they are 
black beneath the stars. On many nights 
I have sat in the sand at a distance and 
looked at them, and always, and increas- 
ingly, they have stirred my imagination. 
Their profound calm, their classical sim- 
plicity, are greatly emphasized when no 
detail can be seen, when they are but black 
shapes towering to the stars. They seem 
to aspire then like prayers prayed by one 
who has said, " God does not need my 



THE SPHINX 



21 



prayers, but I need them/' In their sim- 
plicity they suggest a crowd of thoughts, 
and of desires. Guy de Maupassant has 
said that of all the arts architecture is 
perhaps the most aesthetic, the most mys- 
terious, and the most nourished by ideas. 
How true this is you feel as you look 
at the Great Pyramid by night. It 
seems to breathe out mystery. The 
immense base recalls to you the laby- 
rinth within; the long descent from the 
tiny slit that gives you entrance, your un- 
certain steps in its hot, eternal night, your 
falls on the ice-like surfaces of its polished 
blocks of stone, the crushing weight that 
seemed to lie on your heart as you stole 
uncertainly on, summoned almost as by 
the desert; your sensation of being for 
ever imprisoned, taken and hidden by a 
monster from Egypt's wonderful light, as 
you stood in the central chamber, and 
realized the stone ocean into whose 
depths, like some intrepid diver, you had 
dared deliberately to come. And then 



22 



THE SPHINX 



your eyes travel up the slowly shrinking 
walls till they reach the dark point which 
is the top. There you stood with Abou, 
who spends half his life on the highest 
stone, hostages of the sun, bathed in light 
and air that perhaps came to you from the 
Gold Coast. And you saw men and cam- 
els like flies, and Cairo like a grey blur, 
and the Mokattam hills almost as a higher 
ridge of the sands. The mosque of Mo- 
hammed Ali was like a cup turned over. 
Far below slept the dead in that grave- 
yard of the Sphinx, with its pale stones, 
its sand, its palm, its " Sycamores of the 
South/' once worshipped and regarded as 
Hathor's living body. And beyond them 
on one side were the sleeping waters, with 
islands small, surely, as delicate Egyp- 
tian hands, and on the other the great 
desert that stretches, so the Bedouins say, 
on and on " for a march of a thousand 
days."" 

That base and that summit — what sug- 
gestion and what mystery in their con- 



THE SPHINX 



23 



trast! What sober, eternal beauty in the 
dark line which unites them, now sharply, 
yet softly, defined against the night, which 
is purple as the one garment of the fel- 
lah! That line leads the soul irresistibly 
from earth to the stars. 




SAKKARA 



Ill 



SAKKARA 

It was the " Little Christmas " of the 
Egyptians as I rode to Sakkara, after 
seeing a wonderful feat, the ascent and 
descent of the second Pyramid in nine- 
teen minutes by a young Bedouin called 
Mohammed Ali, who very seriously in- 
formed me that the only Roumi who had 
ever reached the top was an " American 
gentlemens " called Mark Twain, on his 
first visit to Egypt. On his second visit, 
Ali said, Mr. Twain had a bad foot, and 
declared he could not be bothered with 
the second Pyramid. He had been up and 
down it once without a guide ; he had dis- 
turbed the jackal which lives near its sum- 
mit, and which I saw running in the sun- 



28 



SAKKARA 



shine as Ali drew near its lair, and he was 
satisfied to rest on his immortal laurels. 
To the Bedouins of the Pyramids Mark 
Twain's world-wide celebrity is owing to 
one fact alone: he is the only Roumi who 
has climbed the second Pyramid. That 
is why his name is known to every 
one. 

It was the " Little Christmas/' and 
from the villages in the plain the Egyp- 
tians came pouring out to visit their dead 
in the desert cemeteries as I passed by to 
visit the dead in the tombs far off on the 
horizon. Women, swathed in black, gath- 
ered in groups and jumped monotonously 
up and down, to the accompaniment of 
stained hands clapping, and strange and 
weary songs. Tiny children blew furi- 
ously into tin trumpets, emitting sounds 
that were terribly European. Men strode 
seriously by, or stood in knots among the 
graves, talking vivaciously of the things 
of this life. As the sun rose higher in 
the heavens, this visit to the dead became 



SAKKARA 



29 



a carnival of the living. Laughter and 
shrill cries of merriment betokened the 
resignation of the mourners. The sand- 
dunes were black with running figures, 
racing, leaping, chasing one another, roll- 
ing over and over in the warm and golden 
grains. Some sat among the graves and 
ate. Some sang. Some danced. I saw 
no one praying, after the sun was up. 
The Great Pyramid of Ghizeh was trans- 
formed in this morning hour, and gleamed 
like a marble mountain, or like the hill 
covered with salt at El-Outaya, in Al- 
geria. As we went on it sank down into 
the sands, until at last I could see only a 
small section with its top, which looked 
almost as pointed as a gigantic needle. 
Abou was there on the hot stones in the 
golden eye of the sun — Abou who lives to 
respect his Pyramid, and to serve Turk- 
ish coffee to those who are determined 
enough to climb it. Before me the Step 
Pyramid rose, brown almost as bronze, 
out of the sands here desolate and pallid. 



30 



SAKKARA 



Soon I was in the house of Marriette, be- 
tween the little sphinxes. 

Near Cairo, although the desert is real 
desert, it does not give, to me, at any rate, 
the immense impression of naked sterility, 
of almost brassy, sun-baked fierceness, 
which often strikes one in the Sahara to 
the south of Algeria, where at midday 
one sometimes has a feeling of being lost 
upon a waste of metal, gleaming, angry, 
tigerish in color. Here, in Egypt, both 
the people and the desert seem gentler, 
safer, more amiable. Yet these tombs of 
Sakkara are hidden in a desolation of the 
sands, peculiarly blanched and mournful; 
and as you wander from tomb to 
tomb, descending and ascending, stealing 
through great galleries beneath the sands, 
creeping through tubes of stone, crouch- 
ing almost on hands and knees in the sul- 
try chambers of the. dead, the awfulness 
of the passing away of dynasties and of 
races comes, like a cloud, upon your spirit. 
But this cloud lifts and floats from you 



SAKKARA 



3i 



in the cheerful tomb of Thi, that royal 
councillor, that scribe and confidant, 
whose life must have been passed in a 
round of serene activities, amid a sneer- 
ing, though doubtless admiring, popula- 
tion. 

Into this tomb of white, vivacious fig- 
ures, gay almost, though never wholly 
frivolous — for these men were full of 
purpose, full of an ardor that seduces 
even where it seems grotesque — I took 
with me a child of ten called Ali, from 
the village of Kafiah; and as I looked 
from him to the walls around us, rather 
than the passing away of the races, I re- 
alized the persistence of type. For every- 
where I saw the face of little Ali, with 
every feature exactly reproduced. Here 
he was bending over a sacrifice, leading a 
sacred bull, feeding geese from a cu£>, 
roasting a chicken, pulling a Jboat, car- 
pentering, polishing, conducting a mon- 
key for a walk, or merely sitting bolt up- 
right and sneering. There were lines of 



3^ 



SAKKARA 



little Alis with their hands held to their 
breasts, their faces in profile, their knees 
rigid, in the happy tomb of Thi; but he 
glanced at them unheeding, did not recog- 
nize his ancestors. And he did not care 
to penetrate into the tombs of Mera and 
Meri-Ra-ankh, into the Serapeum and the 
Mestaba of Ptah-hotep. Perhaps he was 
right. The Serapeum is grand in its vast- 
ness, with its long and high galleries and 
its mighty vaults containing the huge 
granite sarcophagi of the sacred bulls of 
Apis ; Mera, red and white, welcomes you 
from an elevated niche benignly; Ptah- 
hotep, priest of the fifth dynasty, receives 
you, seated at a table that resembles a 
rake with long, yellow teeth standing on 
its handle, and drinking stiffly a cup of 
wine. You see upon the wall near by, with 
sympathy, a patient being plied by a naked 
and evidently an unyielding physician 
with medicine from a jar that might have 
been visited by Morgiana, a musician 
playing upon an instrument like a huge 



SAKKARA 33 

and stringless harp. But it is the happy 
tomb of Thi that lingers in your memory. 
In that tomb one sees proclaimed with a 
marvellous ingenuity and expressiveness 
the joy and the activity of life. Thi must 
have loved life; loved prayer and sacri- 
fice, loved sport and war, loved feasting 
and gaiety, labor of the hands and of the 
head, loved the arts, the music of flute 
and harp, singing by the lingering and 
plaintive voices which seem to express the 
essence of the East, loved sweet odors, 
loved sweet women — do we not see him 
sitting to receive offerings with his wife 
beside him? — loved the clear nights and 
the radiant days that in Egypt make glad 
the heart of man. He must have loved 
the splendid gift of life, and used it com- 
pletely. And so little Ali did very right 
to make his sole obeisance at Thi's deli- 
cious tomb, from which death itself seems 
banished by the soft and embracing radi- 
ance of the almost living walls. 

This delicate cheerfulness, a quite airy 



34 



SAKKARA 



gaiety of life, is often combined in Egypt, 
and most beautifully and happily com- 
bined, with tremendous solidity, heavy 
impressiveness, a hugeness that is well- 
nigh tragic ; and it supplies a relief to eye, 
to mind, to soul, that is sweet and refresh- 
ing as the trickle of a tarantella from a 
reed flute heard under the shadows of a 
temple of Hercules. Life showers us with 
contrasts. Art, which gives to us a sec- 
ond and a more withdrawn life, opening 
to us a door through which we pass to 
our dreams, may well imitate life in this. 



ABYDOS 



IV 



ABYDOS 

Through a long and golden noontide, 
and on into an afternoon whose opulence 
of warmth and light it seemed could never 
wane, I sat alone, or wandered gently 
quite alone, in the Temple of Seti I. at 
Abydos. Here again I was in a place 
of the dead. In Egypt one ever seeks the 
dead in the sunshine, black vaults in the 
land of the gold. But here in Abydos I 
was accompanied by whiteness. The gen- 
eral effect of Seti's mighty temple is that 
it is a white temple when seen in full sun- 
shine and beneath a sky of blinding blue. 
In an arid place it stands, just beyond an 
Egyptian village that is a maze of dust, 
37 



38 



ABYDOS 



of children, of animals, and flies. The 
last blind houses of the village, brown as 
brown paper, confront it on a mound, and 
as I came toward it a girl-child swathed 
in purple, with ear-rings, and a twist of 
orange handkerchief above her eyes, full 
of cloud and fire, leaned from a roof, sin- 
uously as a young snake, to watch me. 
On each side, descending, were white, 
ruined walls, stretched out like defaced 
white arms of the temple to receive me. 
I stood still for a moment and looked at 
the narrow, severely simple doorway, at 
the twelve broken columns advanced on 
either side, white and greyish white with 
their right angles, their once painted fig- 
ures now almost wholly colorless. 

Here lay the Osirians, those blessed 
dead of the land of Egypt, who wor- 
shipped the Judge of the Dead, the Lord 
of the Underworld, and who hoped for 
immortality through him — Osiris, hus- 
band of Isis, Osiris, receiver of prayers, 
Osiris the sun who will not be conquered 



ABYDOS 



39 



by night, but eternally rises again, and 
so is the symbol of the resurrection of the 
soul. It is said that Set, the power of 
Evil, tore the body of Osiris into fourteen 
fragments and scattered them over the 
land. But multitudes of worshippers of 
Osiris believed him buried near Abydos 
and, like those who loved the sweet songs 
of Hafiz, they desired to be buried near 
him whom they adored; and so this place 
became a place of the dead, a place of 
many prayers, a white place of many 
longings. 

I was glad to be alone there. The 
guardian left me in perfect peace. I hap- 
pily forgot him. I sat down in the shadow 
of a column upon its mighty projecting 
base. The sky was blinding blue. Great 
bees hummed, like bourdons, through the 
silence, deepening the almost heavy calm. 
These columns, architraves, doorways, 
how mighty, how grandly strong they 
were ! And yet soon I began to be aware 
that even here, where surely one should 



40 



ABYDOS 



read only the Book of the Dead, or bend 
down to the hot ground to listen if per- 
chance one might hear the dead them- 
selves murmuring over the chapters of 
Beatification far down in their hidden 
tombs, there was a likeness, a gentle 
gaiety of life, as in the tomb of Thi. The 
effect of solidity was immense. These 
columns bulged, almost like great fruits 
swollen out by their heady strength of 
blood. They towered up in crowds. The 
heavy roof, broken in places most merci- 
fully to show squares and oblongs of that 
perfect, calling blue, was like a frowning 
brow. And yet I was with grace, with 
gentleness, with lightness, because in the 
place of the dead I was again with the 
happy, living walls. Above me, on the 
roof, there was a gleam of palest blue, 
like the blue I have sometimes seen at 
morning on the Ionian sea just where it 
meets the shore. The double rows of gi- 
gantic columns stretched away, tall al- 
most as forest trees, to right of me and 



ABYDOS 41 

to left, and were shut in by massive walls, 
strong as the walls of a fortress. And on 
these columns, and on these walls, dead 
painters and gravers had breathed the 
sweet breath of life. Here in the sun, 
for me alone, as it seemed, a population 
followed their occupations. Men walked, 
and kneeled, and stood, some white and 
clothed, some nude, some red as the red 
man's child that leaped beyond the sea. 
And here was the lotus-flower held in 
reverent hands, not the rose-lotus, but the 
blossom that typified the rising again of 
the sun, and that, worn as an amulet, sig- 
nified the gift of eternal youth. And here 
was hawk-faced Horus, and here a priest 
offering sacrifice to a god, belief in whom 
has long since passed away. A king re- 
vealed himself to me, adoring Ptah, 
" Father of the beginnings," who estab- 
lished upon earth, my figures thought, the 
everlasting justice, and again at the knees 
of Amen burning incense in his honor. 
Isis and Osiris stood together, and sacri- 



42 



ABYDOS 



fice was made before their sacred bark. 
And Seti worshipped them, and Seshta, 
goddess of learning, wrote in the book of 
eternity the name of the king. 

The great bees hummed, moving slowly 
in the golden air among the mighty col- 
umns, passing slowly among these records 
of lives long over, but which seemed still 
to be. And I looked at the lotus-flowers 
which the little grotesque hands were 
holding, had been holding for how many 
years — the flowers that typified the rising 
again of the sun and the divine gift of 
eternal youth. And I thought of the bird 
and the Sphinx, the thing that was whim- 
sical wooing the thing that was mighty. 
And I gazed at the immense columns and 
at the light and little figures all about me. 
Bird and Sphinx, delicate whimsicality, 
calm and terrific power! In Egypt the 
dead men have combined them, and the 
combination has an irresistible fascina- 
tion, weaves a spell that entrances you in 
the sunshine and beneath the blinding 



ABYDOS 



43 



blue. At Abydos I knew it. And I loved 
the columns that seemed blown out with 
exuberant strength, and I loved the deli- 
cate white walls that, like the lotus-flower, 
give to the world a youth that seems eter- 
nal — a youth that is never frivolous, but 
that is full of the divine, and yet pathetic, 
animation of happy life. 

The great bees hummed more drowsily. 
I sat quite still in the sun. And then 
presently, moved by some prompting in- 
stinct, I turned my head, and, far off, 
through the narrow portal of the temple, 
I saw the girl-child swathed in purple still 
lying, sinuously as a young snake, upon 
the palm-wood roof above the brown earth 
wall to watch me with her eyes of cloud 
and fire. 

And upon me, like cloud and fire — cloud 
of the tombs and the great temple col- 
umns, fire of the brilliant life painted and 
engraved upon them — there stole the spell 
of Egypt. 



THE NILE 



V 



THE NILE 

I do not find in Egypt any more the 
strangeness that once amazed, and at first 
almost bewildered me. Stranger far is 
Morocco, stranger the country beyond 
Biskra, near Mogar, round Touggourt, 
even about El Kantara. There I feel very 
far away, as a child feels distance from 
dear, familiar things. I look to the hori- 
zon expectant of I know not what magical 
occurrences, what mysteries. I am aware 
of the summons to advance to marvellous 
lands, where marvellous things must hap- 
pen. I am taken by that sensation of al- 
most trembling magic which came to me 
when first I saw a mirage far out in the 
Sahara. But Egypt, though it contains 
47 



4 8 



THE NILE 



so many marvels, has no longer for me 
the marvellous atmosphere. Its keynote 
is seductiveness. 

In Egypt one feels very safe. Smiling 
policemen in clothes of spotless white- — 
emblematic, surely, of their innocence! — 
seem to be everywhere, standing calmly 
in the sun. Very gentle, very tender, al- 
though perhaps not very true, are the Be- 
douins at the Pyramids. Up the Nile the 
fellaheen smile as kindly as the policemen, 
smile protect ingly upon you, as if they 
would say, " Allah has placed us here to 
take care of the confiding stranger/' No 
ferocious demands for money fall upon 
my ears ; only an occasional suggestion is 
subtly conveyed to me that even the poor 
must live and that I am immensely rich. 
An amiable, an almost enticing seductive- 
ness seems emanating from the fertile 
soil, shining in the golden air, gleaming 
softly in the amber sands, dimpling in the 
brown, the mauve, the silver eddies of 
the Nile. It steals upon one. It ripples 



THE NILE 



49 



over one. It laps one as if with warm 
and scented waves. A sort of lustrous 
languor overtakes one. In physical well- 
being one sinks down, and with wide eyes 
one gazes and listens and enjoys, and 
thinks not of the morrow. 

The dahabiyeh — her very name, the 
Loulia, has a gentle, seductive, cooing 
sound — drifts broadside to the current 
with furled sails, or glides smoothly on 
before an amiable north wind with sails 
unfurled. Upon the bloomy banks, rich 
brown in color, the brown men stoop and 
straighten themselves, and stoop again, 
and sing. The sun gleams on their cop- 
per skins, which look polished and metal- 
lic. Crouched in his net behind the drowsy 
oxen, the little boy circles the livelong 
day with the sakieh. And the sakieh 
raises its wailing, wayward voice and 
sings to the shadoof; and the shadoof 
sings to the sakieh; and the lifted water 
falls and flows away into the green wild- 
erness of doura that, like a miniature 



So 



THE NILE 



forest, spreads on every hand to the low 
mountains, which do not perturb the 
spirit, as do the iron mountains of Al- 
geria. And always the sun is shining, 
and the body is drinking in its warmth, 
and the soul is drinking in its gold. And 
always the ears are full of warm and 
drowsy and monotonous music. And al- 
ways the eyes see the lines of brown bod- 
ies, on the brown river-banks above the 
brown waters, bending, straightening, 
bending, straightening, with an exquis- 
itely precise monotony. And always the 
Loulia seems to be drifting, so quietly 
she slips up, or down, the level water- 
way. 

And one drifts, too; one can but drift, 
happily, sleepily, forgetting every care. 
From Abydos to Denderah one drifts, and 
from Denderah to Karnak, to Luxor, to 
all the marvels on the western shore ; and 
on to Edfu, to Kom Ombos, to Assuan, 
and perhaps even into Nubia, to Abti- 
Simbel, and to Wadi-Halfa. Life on the 



THE NILE 



Nile is a long dream, golden and sweet as 
honey of Hymettus. For I let the " di- 
vine serpent/' who at Philae may be seen 
issuing from her charmed cavern, take 
me very quietly to see the abodes of the 
dead, the halls of the vanished, upon her 
green and sterile shores. I know nothing 
of the bustling, shrieking steamer that 
defies her, churning into angry waves her 
waters for the edification of those who 
would " do " Egypt and be gone before 
they know her. 

If you are in a hurry, do not come to 
Egypt. To hurry in Egypt is as wrong 
as to fall asleep in Wall Street, or to sit 
in the Greek Theatre at Taormina, read- 
ing " How to Make a Fortune with a 
Capital of Fifty Pounds." 



DENDERAH 



VI 



DENDERAH 

From Abydos, home of the cult of Osiris, 
Judge of the Dead, I came to Denderah, 
the great temple of the " Lady of the 
Underworld/' as the goddess Hathor was 
sometimes called, though she was usually 
worshipped as the Egyptian Aphrodite, 
goddess of joy, goddess of love and loveli- 
ness. It was early morning when I went 
ashore. The sun was above the eastern 
hills, and a boy, clad in a rope of plaited 
grass, sent me half shyly the greeting, 
"May your day be happy ! " 

Youth is, perhaps, the most divine of 
all the gifts of the gods, as those who 
wore the lotus-blossom amulet believed 
thousands of years ago, and Denderah, 
53 



56 



DENDERAH 



appropriately, is a very young Egyptian 
temple, probably, indeed, the youngest of 
all the temples on the Nile. Its youth- 
fulness — it is only about two thousand 
years of age— identifies it happily with 
the happiness and beauty of its presiding 
deity, and as I rode toward it on the canal- 
bank in the young freshness of the morn- 
ing, I thought of the goddess Safekh 
and of the sacred Persea-tree. When 
Safekh inscribed upon a leaf of the Per- 
sea-tree the name of king or conqueror, 
he gained everlasting life. Was it the 
life of youth? An everlasting life of 
middle age might be a doubtful benefit. 
And then mentally I added, " unless one 
lived in Egypt/' For here the years drop 
from one, and every golden hour brings 
to one surely another drop of the won- 
drous essence that sets time at defiance 
and charms sad thoughts away. 

Unlike White Abydos, White Den- 
derah stands apart from habitations, in 
a still solitude upon a blackened mound. 



DENDERAH 



57 



From far off I saw the f agade, large, bare, 
and sober, rising, in a nakedness as com- 
plete as that of Aphrodite rising from the 
wave, out of the plain of brown, alluvial 
soil that was broken here and there by a 
sharp green of growing things. There 
was something of sadness in the scene, 
and again I thought of Hathor as the 
" Lady of the Underworld/' some deep- 
eyed being, with a pale brow, hair like 
the night, and yearning, wistful hands 
stretched out in supplication. There was 
a hush upon this place. The loud and ve- 
hement cry of the shadoof-man died 
away. The sakieh droned in my ears no 
more like distant Sicilian pipes playing 
at Natale. I felt a breath from the desert. 
And, indeed, the desert was near — that 
realistic desert which suggests to the 
traveller approaches to the sea, so that 
beyond each pallid dune, as he draws 
near it, he half expects to hear the lap- 
ping of the waves. Presently, when, hav- 
ing ascended that marvellous staircase 



DENDERAH 



of the New Year, walking in procession 
with the priests upon its walls toward the 
rays of Ra, I came out upon the temple 
roof, and looked upon the desert — upon 
sheeny sands, almost like slopes of satin 
shining in the sun, upon paler sands in 
the distance, holding an Arab campo 
santo, in which rose the little creamy cu- 
polas of a sheikh's tomb, surrounded by 
a creamy wall, those little cupolas gave 
to me a feeling of the real, the irresistible 
Africa such as I had not known since I 
had been in Egypt ; and I thought I heard 
in the distance the ceaseless hum of pray- 
ing and praising voices. 

" God hath rewarded the faithful with 
gardens through which flow rivulets. 
They shall be for ever therein, and that is 
the reward of the virtuous." 

The sensation of solemnity which over- 
took me as I approached the temple deep- 
ened when I drew close to it, when I stood 
within it. In the first hall, mighty, mag- 
nificent, full of enormous columns from 



DENDERAH 



59 



which faces of Hathor once looked to the 
four points of the compass, I found only 
one face almost complete, saved from the 
fury of fanatics by the protection of the 
goddess of chance, in whom the modern 
Egyptian so implicitly believes. In shape 
it was a delicate oval. In the long eyes, 
about the brow, the cheeks, there was a 
strained expression that suggested to me 
more than a gravity — almost an anguish 
— of spirit. As I looked at it, I thought 
of Eleanora Duse. Was this the ideal of 
joy in the time of the Ptolemies? Joy 
may be rapturous, or it may be serene; 
but could it ever be like this? The pale, 
delicious blue that here and there, in tiny 
sections, broke the almost haggard, grey- 
ish whiteness of this first hall with the 
roof of black, like bits of an evening sky 
seen through tiny window-slits in a som- 
bre room, suggested joy, was joy summed 
up in color. But Hathor's face was weari- 
ful and sad. 

From the gloom of the inner halls came 



6o 



DENDERAH 



a sound, loud, angry, menacing, as I 
walked on, a sound of menace and an 
odor, heavy and deathlike. Only in the 
first hall had those builders and decora- 
tors of two thousand years ago been 
moved by their conception of the goddess 
to hail her, to worship her, with the pur- 
ity of white, with the sweet gaiety of tur- 
quoise. Or so it seems to-day, when the 
passion of Christianity against Hathor has 
spent itself and died. Now Christians 
come to seek what Christian Copts de- 
stroyed; wander through the deserted 
courts, desirous of looking upon the faces 
that have long since been hacked to pieces. 
A more benign spirit informs our world, 
but, alas! Hathor has been sacrificed to 
the deviltries of old. And it is well, per- 
haps, that her temple should be sad, like 
a place of silent waiting for the glories 
that are gone. 

With every step my melancholy grew. 
Encompassed by gloomy odors, assailed 
by the clamour of gigantic bats, which 



\ 



DENDERAH 



61 



flew furiously among the monstrous pil- 
lars near a roof ominous as a storm-cloud, 
my spirit was haunted by the sad eyes of 
Hathor, which gaze for ever from that 
column in the first hall. Were they al- 
ways like that? Once that face dwelt 
with a crowd of worship. And all the 
other faces have gone, and all the glory 
has passed. And, like so many of the 
living, the goddess has paid for her splen- 
dors. The pendulum swung, and where 
men adored, men hated her — her the god- 
dess of love and loveliness. And as the 
human face changes when terror and sor- 
row come, I felt as if Hathor's face of 
stone had changed upon its column, look- 
ing toward the Nile, in obedience to the 
anguish in her heart; I felt as if Denderah 
were a majestic house of grief. So I 
must always think of it, dark, tragic, and 
superb. The Egyptians once believed that 
when death came to a man, the soul of 
him, which they called the Ba, winged its 
way to the gods, but that, moved by a 



62 



DENDERAH 



sweet unselfishness, it returned some time 
to his tomb, to give comfort to the poor, 
deserted mummy. Upon the lids of sar- 
cophagi it is sometimes represented as a 
bird, flying down to, or resting upon, the 
mummy. As I went onward in the dark- 
ness, among the columns, over the blocks 
of stone that form the pavements, seeing 
vaguely the sacred boats upon the walls, 
Horus and Thoth, the king before Osiris; 
as I mounted and descended with the 
priests to roof and floor, I longed, instead 
of the clamour of the bats, to hear the 
light flutter of the soft wings of the Ba 
of Hathor, flying from Paradise to this 
sad temple of the desert to bring her com- 
fort in the gloom. I thought of her as 
a poor woman, suffering as only women 
can in loneliness. 

In the museum at Cairo there is the 
mummy of " the lady Amanit, priestess 
of Hathor/' She lies there upon her back, 
with her thin body slightly turned toward 
the left side, as if in an effort to change 



DENDERAH 



63 



her position. Her head is completely 
turned to the same side. Her mouth is 
wide open, showing all the teeth. The 
tongue is lolling out. Upon the head the 
thin, brown hair makes a line above the 
little ear, and is mingled at the back of 
the head with false tresses. Round the 
neck is a mass of ornaments, of amulets 
and beads. The right arm and hand lie 
along the body. The expression of " the 
lady Amanit " is very strange, and very 
subtle ; for it combines horror — which im- 
plies activity — with a profound, an im- 
penetrable repose, far beyond the reach 
of all disturbance. In the temple of Den- 
derah I fancied the lady Amanit minister- 
ing sadly, even terribly, to a lonely god- 
dess, moving in fear through an eternal 
gloom, dying at last there, overwhelmed 
by tasks too heavy for that tiny body, 
the ultra-sensitive spirit that inhabited 
it. And now she sleeps — one feels 
that, as one gazes at the mummy 
— very profoundly, though not yet very 



64 



DENDERAH 



calmly, the lady Amanit. But her 
goddess — still she wakes upon her col- 
umn. 

When I came out at last into the sun- 
light of the growing day, I circled the 
temple, skirting its gigantic, corniced 
walls, from which at intervals the heads 
and paws of resting lions protrude, to see 
another woman whose fame for loveliness 
and seduction is almost as legendary as 
Aphrodite's. It is fitting enough that 
Cleopatra's form should be graven upon 
the temple of Hathor ; fitting, also, that 
though I found her in the presence of 
deities, and in the company of her son, 
Caesarion, her face, which is in profile, 
should have nothing of Hathor's sad im- 
pressiveness. This, no doubt, is not the 
real Cleopatra. Nevertheless, this face 
suggests a certain self-complacent cruelty 
and sensuality essentially human, and ut- 
terly detached from all divinity, whereas 
in the face of the goddess there is a some- 
thing remote, and even distantly intellec- 



DENDERAH 



65 



tual, which calls the imagination to " the 
fields beyond." 

As I rode back toward the river, I saw 
again the boy clad in the rope of plaited 
grass, and again he said, less shyly, " May 
your day be happy ! " It was a kindly 
wish. In the dawn I had felt it to be al- 
most a prophecy. But now I was haunted 
by the face of the goddess of Denderah, 
and I remembered the legend of the lovely 
Lais, who, when she began to age, cov- 
ered herself from the eyes of men with a 
veil, and went every day at evening to 
look upon her statue, in . which the genius 
of Praxiteles had rendered permanent the 
beauty the woman could not keep. One 
evening, hanging to the statue's pedestal 
by a garland of red roses, the sculptor 
found a mirror, upon the polished disk of 
which were traced these words: 

" Lais, O Goddess, consecrates to thee 
her mirror: no longer able to see there 
what she was, she will not see there what 
she has become." 



66 



DENDERAH 



My Hathor of Denderah, the sad-eyed 
dweller on the column in the first hall, had 
she a mirror, would surely hang it, as Lais 
hung hers, at the foot of the pedestal of 
the Egyptian Aphrodite; had she a veil, 
would surely cover the face that, solitary 
among the cruel evidences of Christian 
ferocity, silently says to the gloomy 
courts, to the shining desert and the Nile : 

" Once I was worshipped, but I am 
worshipped no longer/' 



KARNAK 



VII 



KARNAK 

BuiivDiNGS have personalities. Some fas- 
cinate as beautiful women fascinate; some 
charm as a child may charm, naively, 
simply, but irresistibly. Some, like con- 
querors, men of blood and iron, without 
bowels of mercy, pitiless and determined, 
strike awe to the soul, mingled with the 
almost gasping admiration that power 
wakes in man. Some bring a sense of 
heavenly peace to the heart. Some, like 
certain temples of the Greeks, by their 
immense dignity, speak to the nature al- 
most as music speaks, and change anxiety 
to trust. Some tug at the hidden chords 
of romance and rouse a trembling re- 
sponse. Some seem to be mingling their 
tears with the tears of the dead; some 

69 



70 



KARNAK 



their laughter with the laughter of the 
living. The traveller, sailing up the Nile, 
holds intercourse with many of these dif- 
ferent personalities. He is sad, perhaps, 
as I was with Denderah ; dreams in the 
sun with Abydos; muses with Luxor be- 
neath the little, tapering minaret whence 
the call to prayer drops down to be an- 
swered by the angelus bell; falls into a 
reverie in the " thinking place " of Ram- 
eses II., near to the giant that was once 
the mightiest of all Egyptian statues; 
eagerly wakes to the fascination of rec- 
ord at Deir-el-Bahari ; worships in Edfu; 
by Philse is carried into a realm of deli- 
cate magic, where engineers are not. 
Each prompts him to a different mood; 
each wakes in his nature a different re- 
sponse. And at Karnak what is he? 
What mood enfolds him there? Is he sad, 
thoughtful, awed, or gay? 

An old lady in a helmet, and other 
things considered no doubt by her as 
suited to Egypt rather than to herself, 



KARNAK 



7i 



remarked in my hearing, with a Scotch 
accent and an air of summing up, that 
Karnak was " very nice indeed." There 
she was wrong — Scotch and wrong. Kar- 
nak is not nice. No temple that I have 
seen upon the banks of the Nile is nice. 
And Karnak cannot be summed up in a 
phrase or in many phrases; cannot even 
be adequately described in few or many 
words. 

Long ago I saw it lighted up with col- 
ored fires one night for the Khedive, its 
ravaged magnificence tinted with rose 
and livid green and blue, its pylons glit- 
tering with artificial gold, its population 
of statues, its obelisks, and columns, 
changing from things of dreams to things 
of day, from twilight marvels to shadowy 
spectres, and from these to hard and 
piercing realities at the cruel will of pig- 
mies crouching by its walls. Now, after 
many years, I saw it first quietly by 
moonlight after watching the sunset from 
the summit of the great pylon. That was 



KARNAK 



a pageant worth more than the Khedive's. 

I was in the air; had something of the 
released feeling I have often known upon 
the tower of Biskra, looking out toward 
evening to the Sahara spaces. But here 
I was not confronted with an immensity 
of nature, but with a gleaming river and 
an immensity of man. Beneath me was 
the native village, in the heart of daylight 
dusty and unkempt, but now becoming 
charged with velvety beauty, with the 
soft and heavy mystery that at evening is 
born among great palm-trees. Along the 
path that led from it, coming toward the 
avenue of sphinxes with ram's-heads that 
watch for ever before the temple door, 
a great white camel stepped, its rider a 
tiny child with a close, white cap upon his 
head. The child was singing to the glory 
of the sunset, or was it to the glory of 
Amun, " the hidden one," once the local 
god of Thebes, to whom the grandest tem- 
ple in the world was dedicated? I listen 
to the childish, quavering voice, twitter- 



KARNAK 



73 



ing almost like a bird, and one word alone 
came up to me — the word one hears in 
Egypt from all the lips that speak and 
sing: from the Nubians round their fires 
at night, from the lithe boatmen of the 
lower reaches of the Nile, from the Be- 
douins of the desert, and the donkey boys 
of the villages, from the sheikh who reads 
one's future in water spilt on a plate, and 
the Bisharin with buttered curls who runs 
to sell one beads from his tent among the 
sand-dunes. 

" Allah ! " the child was singing as he 
passed upon his way. 

Pigeons circled above their pretty tow- 
ers. The bats came out, as if they knew 
how precious is their black at evening 
against the ethereal lemon color, the or- 
ange and the red. The little obelisk be- 
yond the last sphinx on the left began to 
change, as in Egypt all things change at 
sunset — pylon and dusty bush, colossus 
and baked earth hovel, sycamore, and 
tamarisk, statue and trotting donkey. It 



74 



KARNAK 



looked like a mysterious finger pointed in 
warning toward the sky. The Nile began 
to gleam. Upon its steel and silver torches 
of amber flame were lighted. The Libyan 
mountains became spectral beyond the 
tombs of the kings. The tiny, rough cu- 
polas that mark a grave close to the 
sphinxes, in daytime dingy and poor, now 
seemed made of some splendid material 
worthy to roof the mummy of a king. 
Far off a pool of the Nile, that from here 
looked like a little palm-fringed lake, 
turned ruby-red. The flags from the 
standard of Luxor, among the minarets, 
flew out straight against a sky that was 
pale as a primrose, almost cold in its amaz- 
ing delicacy. 

I turned, and behind me the moon was 
risen. Already its silver rays fell upon 
the ruins of Karnak ; upon the thickets of 
lotus columns; upon solitary gateways 
that now give entrance to no courts ; upon 
the sacred lake, with its reeds, where the 
black w r ater-fowl were asleep; upon slop- 



KARNAK 



75 



ing walls, shored up by enormous stanch- 
ions, like ribs of some prehistoric levia- 
than; upon small chambers; upon fallen 
blocks of masonry, fragments of archi- 
trave and pavement, of capital and cor- 
nice; and upon the people of Karnak — 
those fascinating people who still cling to 
their habitation in the ruins, faithful 
through misfortune, affectionate with a 
steadfastness that defies the cruelty of 
Time; upon the little, lonely white sphinx 
with the woman's face and the downward- 
sloping eyes full of sleepy seduction; 
upon Rameses II. , with the face of a 
kindly child, not of a king; upon the 
sphinx, bereft of its companion, which 
crouches before the kiosk of Taharga, the 
King of Ethiopia; upon those two who 
stand together as if devoted, yet by their 
attitudes seem to express characters di- 
ametrically opposed, grey men and vivid, 
the one with folded arms calling to Peace, 
the other with arms stretched down in 
a gesture of crude determination, sum- 



7 6 



KARNAK 



moning War, as if from the underworld; 
upon the granite foot and ankle in the 
temple of Rameses III., which in their 
perfection, like the headless Victory in 
Paris, and the Niobide Chiaramonti in 
the Vatican, suggest a great personality, 
compose a great personality that once met 
with is not to be forgotten: upon these 
and their companions, who would not for- 
sake the halls and courts where once they 
dwelt with splendor, where now they 
dwell with ruin that attracts the gap- 
ing world. The moon was risen, but the 
west was still full of color and light. It 
faded. There was a pause. Only a bar 
of dull red, holding a hint of brown, lay 
where the sun had sunk. And minutes 
passed — minutes for me full of silent ex- 
pectation, while the moonlight grew a lit- 
tle stronger, a few more silver rays slipped 
down upon the ruins. I turned toward 
the east. And then came that curious 
crescendo of color and of light which, in 
Egypt, succeeds the diminuendo of color 



KARNAK 



77 



and of light that is the prelude to the 
pause before the afterglow. Everything 
seemed to be in subtle movement, heaving 
as a breast heaves with the breath ; swell- 
ing slightly, as if in an effort to be more, 
to attract attention, to gain in significance. 
Pale things became livid, holding appar- 
ently some under-brightness which partly 
penetrated its envelope, but a brightness 
that was white and almost frightful. 
Black things seemed to glow with black- 
ness. The air quivered. Its silence surely 
thrilled with sound — with sound that 
grew ever louder. 

In the east I saw an effect. To the 
west I turned for the cause. The sunset 
light was returning. Horus would not 
permit Turn to reign even for a few brief 
moments, and Khuns, the sacred god of 
the moon, would be witness of a conflict 
in that lovely western region of the ocean 
of the sky where the bark of the sun had 
floated away beneath the mountain rim 
upon the red-and-orange tides. The 



78 



KARNAK 



afterglow was like an exquisite spasm, is 
always like an exquisite spasm, a beauti- 
ful, almost desperate effort ending in the 
quiet darkness of defeat. And through 
that spasmodic effort a world lived for 
some minutes with a life that seemed un- 
real, startling, magical. Color returned 
to the sky — color ethereal, trembling as if 
it knew it ought not to return. Yet it 
stayed for a while and even glowed, 
though it looked always strangely puri- 
fied, and full of a crystal coldness. The 
birds that flew against it were no longer 
birds, but dark, moving ornaments, de- 
vised surely by a supreme artist to height- 
en here and there the beauty of the sky. 
Everything that moved against the after- 
glow — man, woman, child, camel and 
donkey, dog and goat, languishing buffalo, 
and plunging horse — became at once an 
ornament, invented, I fancied, by a genius 
to emphasize, by relieving it, the color in 
which the sky was drowned. And Khuns 
watched serenely, as if he knew the end. 



KARNAK 



79 



And almost suddenly the miraculous ef- 
fort failed. Things again revealed their 
truth, whether commonplace or not. That 
pool of the Nile was no more a red jewel 
set in a feathery pattern of strange de- 
sign, but only water fading from my sight 
beyond a group of palms. And that be- 
low me was only a camel going homeward, 
and that a child leading a bronze-colored 
sheep with a curly coat, and that a dusty, 
flat-roofed hovel, not the fairy home of 
jinn, or the abode of some magician work- 
ing marvels with the sun-rays he had 
gathered in his net. The air was no 
longer thrilling with music. The breast 
that had heaved with a divine breath was 
still as the breast of a corpse. 

And Khuns reigned quietly over the 
plains of Karnak. 

Karnak has no distinctive personality. 
Built under many kings, its ruins are as 
complex as were probably once its com- 
pleted temples, with their shrines, their 
towers, their courts, their hypo-style halls. 



8o 



KARNAK 



As I looked down that evening in the 
moonlight I saw, softened and made more 
touching than in day-time, those alluring 
complexities, brought by the night and 
Khuns into a unity that was both tender 
and superb. Masses of masonry lay 
jumbled in shadow and in silver ; gigantic 
walls cast sharply defined gloom; obelisks 
pointed significantly to the sky, seeming, 
as they always do, to be murmuring a 
message; huge doorways stood up like 
giants unafraid of their loneliness and 
yet pathetic in it; here was a watching 
statue, there one that seemed to sleep, 
seen from afar. Yonder Queen Hat- 
shepsu, who wrought wonders at Deir-el- 
Bahari, and who is more familiar per- 
haps as Hatasu, had left her traces, and 
nearer, to the right, Rameses III. had 
made a temple, surely for the birds, so 
fond they are of it, so pertinaciously they 
haunt it. Rameses II., mutilated and im- 
mense, stood on guard before the terrific 
hall of Seti I. ; and between him and my 



KARNAK 



81 



platform in the air rose the solitary lotus 
column that prepares you for the wonder 
of Seti's hall, which otherwise might al- 
most everwhelm you — unless you are a 
Scotch lady in a helmet. And Khuns had 
his temple here by the Sphinx of the 
twelfth Rameses, and Ptah, who created 
" the sun egg and the moon egg," and 
who was said — only said, alas ! — to have 
established on earth the " everlasting jus- 
tice," had his, and still their stones re- 
ceive the silver moon-rays and wake the 
wonder of men. Thothmes III., Thoth- 
mes L, Shishak, who smote the kneeling 
prisoners and vanquished Jeroboam, Me- 
damut and Mut, Amenhotep L, and 
Amenhotep II. — all have left their rec- 
ords or been celebrated at Karnak. Pur- 
posely I mingled them in my mind — did 
not attempt to put them in their proper 
order, or even to disentangle gods and 
goddesses from conquerors and kings. In 
the warm and seductive night Khuns 
whispered to me : " As long ago at Bekh- 



82 



KARNAK 



ten I exorcised the demon from the suf- 
fering Princess, so now I exorcise from 
these ruins all spirits but my own. To- 
night these ruins shall suggest nothing 
but majesty, tranquillity, and beauty. 
Their records are for Ra, and must be 
studied by his rays. In mine they shall 
speak not to the intellect, but only to the 
emotions and the soul/' 

And presently I went down, and yield- 
ing a complete and happy obedience to 
Khuns, I wandered alone through the stu- 
pendous vestiges of past eras, dead ambi- 
tions, vanished glory, and long-outworn 
belief, and I ignored eras, ambitions, 
glory, and belief, and thought only of 
form, and height, of the miracle of black- 
ness against silver, and of the pathos of 
statues whose ever-open eyes at night, 
when one is near them, suggest the work- 
ing of some evil spell, perpetual watch- 
fulness, combined with eternal inactivity, 
the unslumbering mind caged in the body 
that is paralysed. 



KARNAK 



There is a temple at Karnak that I 
love, and I scarcely know why I care for 
it so much. It is on the right of the soli- 
tary lotus column before you come to the 
terrific hall of Seti. Some people pass 
it by, having but little time, and being 
hypnotized, it seems, by the more astound- 
ing ruin that lies beyond it. And perhaps 
it would be well, on a first visit, to enter 
it last ; to let its influence be the final one 
to rest upon your spirit. This is the tem- 
ple of Rameses III., a brown place of 
calm and retirement, an ineffable place of 
peace. Yes, though the birds love it and 
fill it often with their voices, it is a sanc- 
tuary of peace. Upon the floor the soft 
sand lies, placing silence beneath your 
footsteps. The pale brown of walls and 
columns, almost yellow in the sunshine, 
is delicate and soothing, and inclines the 
heart to calm. Delicious, suggestive of a 
beautiful tapestry, rich and ornate, yet 
always quiet, are the brown reliefs upon 
the stone. What are they ? Does it mat- 



8 4 



KARNAK 



ter? They soften the walls, make them 
more personal, more tender. That surely 
is their mission. This temple holds for 
me a spell. As soon as I enter it, I feel 
the touch of the lotus, as if an invisible 
and kindly hand swept a blossom lightly 
across my face and downward to my 
heart. This courtyard, these small cham- 
bers beyond it, that last doorway fram- 
ing a lovely darkness, soothe me even 
more than the terra-cotta hermitages of 
the Certosa of Pavia. And all the stat- 
ues here are calm with an irrevocable 
calmness, faithful through passing years 
with a very sober faithfulness to the tem- 
ple they adorn. In no other place, one 
feels it, could they be thus at peace, with 
hands crossed for ever upon their breasts, 
which are torn by no anxieties, thrilled 
by no joys. As one stands among them, 
or sitting on the base of a column in the 
chamber that lies beyond them, looks on 
them from a little distance, their atti- 
tude is like a summons to men to con- 



KARNAK 



85 



tend no more, to be still, to enter into 
rest. 

Come to this temple when you leave the 
hall of Seti. There you are in a place of 
triumph. Scarlet, some say, is the color 
of a great note sounded on a bugle. This 
hall is like a bugle-call of the past, thrill- 
ing even now down all the ages with a 
triumph that is surely greater than any 
other triumphs. It suggests blaze — blaze 
of scarlet, blaze of bugle, blaze of glory, 
blaze of life and time, of ambition and 
achievement. In these columns, in the 
putting up of them, dead men sought to 
climb to sun and stars, limitless in desire, 
limitless in industry, limitless in will. And 
at the tops of the columns blooms the lo- 
tus, the symbol of rising. What a tri- 
umph in stone this hall was once, what a 
triumph in stone its ruin is to-day! Per- 
haps, among temples, it is the most won- 
drous thing in all Egypt, as it was, no 
doubt, the most wondrous temple in the 
world; among temples I say, for the 



86 



KARNAK 



Sphinx is of all the marvels of Egypt by 
far the most marvellous. The grandeur 
of this hall almost moves one to tears, 
like the marching past of conquerors, stirs 
the heart with leaping thrills at the ca- 
pacities of men. Through the thicket of 
columns, tall as forest trees, the intense 
blue of the African sky stares down, and 
their great shadows lie along the warm 
and sunlit ground. Listen! There are 
voices chanting. Men are working here — 
working as men worked how many thou- 
sands of years ago. But these are call- 
ing upon the Mohammedan's god as they 
slowly drag to the appointed places the 
mighty blocks of stone. And it is to-day 
a Frenchman who oversees them. 

" Help! Help! Allah give us help! 
Help! Help! Allah give us help!" 

The dust flies up about their naked 
feet. Triumph and work; work succeeded 
by the triumph all can see. I like to hear 
the workmen's voices within the hall of 



KARNAK 



87 



Seti. I like to see the dust stirred by 
their tramping feet. 

And then I like to go once more to the 
little temple, to enter through its defaced 
gateway, to stand alone in its silence be- v 
tween the rows of statues with their arms 
folded upon their quiet breasts, to gaze 
into the tender darkness beyond — the 
darkness that looks consecrated — to feel 
that peace is more wonderful than tri- 
umph, that the end of things is peace. 

Triumph and deathless peace, the 
bugle-call and silence — these are the notes 
of Karnak. 



LUXOR 



VIII 



LUXOR 

Upon the wall of the great court of 
Amenhotep III. in the temple of Luxor 
there is a delicious dancing procession in 
honor of Rameses II. It is very funny 
and very happy; full of the joy of life — 
a sort of radiant cake-walk of old Egyp- 
tian days. How supple are these dancers ! 
They seem to have no bones. One after 
another they come in line upon the mighty 
wall, and each one bends backward to 
the knees of the one who follows. As I 
stood and looked at them for the first time, 
almost I heard the twitter of flutes, the 
rustic wail of the African hautboy, the 
monotonous boom of the derabukkeh, cries 
of a far-off gaiety such as one often hears 
from the Nile by night. But these cries 

9i 



92 



LUXOR 



came down the long avenues of the cen- 
turies ; this gaiety was distant in the vasty 
halls of the long-dead years. Never can 
I think of Luxor without thinking of 
those happy dancers, without thinking of 
the life that goes in the sun on dancing 
feet. 

There are a few places in the world 
that one associates with happiness, that 
one remembers always with a smile, a lit- 
tle thrill at the heart that whispers " There 
joy is." Of these few places Luxor is 
one — Luxor the home of sunshine, the 
suave abode of light, of warmth, of the 
sweet days of gold and sheeny, golden 
sunsets, of silver, shimmering nights 
through which the songs of the boatmen 
of the Nile go floating to the courts and 
the tombs of Thebes. The roses bloom 
in Luxor under the mighty palms. Always 
surely beneath the palms there are the 
roses. And the lateen-sails come up the 
Nile, looking like white-winged promises 
of future golden days. And at dawn one 



LUXOR 



wakes with hope and hears the songs of 
the dawn ; and at noon one dreams of the 
happiness to come; and at sunset one is 
swept away on the gold into the heart 
of the golden world; and at night one 
looks at the stars, and each star is a twink- 
ling hope. Soft are the airs of Luxor; 
there is no harshness in the wind that 
stirs the leaves of the palms. And the 
land is steeped in light. From Luxor one 
goes with regret. One returns to it with 
joy on dancing feet. 

One day I sat in the temple, in the huge 
court with the great double row of col- 
umns that stands on the banks of the Nile 
and looks so splendid from it. The pale 
brown of the stone became almost yellow 
in the sunshine. From the river, hidden 
from me, stole up the songs of the boat- 
men. Nearer at hand I heard pigeons 
cooing, cooing in the sun, as if almost - 
too glad, and seeking to manifest their 
gladness. Behind me, through the col- 
umns, peeped some houses of the village : 



94 



LUXOR 



the white home of Ibrahim Ayyad, the 
perfect dragoman, grandson of Mustapha 
Aga, who entertained me years ago, and 
whose house stood actually within the 
precincts of the temple; houses of other 
fortunate dwellers in Luxor whose names 
I do not know. For the village of Luxor 
crowds boldly about the temple, and the 
children play in the dust almost at the 
foot of obelisks and statues. High on a 
brown hump of earth a buffalo stood 
alone, languishing serenely in the sun, 
gazing at me through the columns with 
light eyes that were full of a sort of folly 
of contentment. Some goats tripped by, 
brown against the brown stone — the dark 
brown earth of the native houses. Inti- 
mate life was here, striking the note of 
the coziness of Luxor. Here was none 
of the sadness and the majesty of Den- 
derah. Grand are the ruins of Luxor, 
noble is the line of columns that boldly 
fronts the Nile ; but Time has given them 
naked to the air and to the sun, to chil- 



LUXOR 



95 



dren and to animals. Instead" of bats, 
the pigeons fly about them. There is no 
dreadful darkness in their sanctuaries. 
Before them the life of the river, behind 
them the life of the village flows and stirs. 
Upon them looks down the Minaret of 
Abu Haggag; and as I sat in the sun- 
shine, the warmth of which began to les- 
sen, I saw upon its lofty circular balcony 
the figure of the muezzin. He leaned 
over, bending toward the temple and the 
statues of Rameses II. and the happy 
dancers on the wall. He opened his lips 
and cried to them: 

" God is great. God is great . . . 
I bear witness that there is no god but 
God. ... I bear witness that Mo- 
hammed is the Apostle of God 

Come to prayer ! Come to prayer ! . . . 
God is great. God is great. There is 
no god but God." 

He circled round the minaret. He cried 
to the Nile. He cried to the Colossi sit- 
ting in their ^lain, and to the yellow preci- 



96 



LUXOR 



pices of the mountains of Libya. He cried 
to Egypt: 

" Come to prayer ! Come to prayer ! 
There is no god but God. There is no 
god but God." 

The days of the gods were dead, and 
their ruined temple echoed with the proc- 
lamation of the one God of the Moslem 
world. " Come to prayer ! Come to 
prayer ! 99 The sun began to sink. 

" Sunset and evening star, and one clear call 
for me." 

The voice of the muezzin died away. 
There was a silence; and then, as if in 
answer to the cry from the minaret, I 
heard the chime of the angelus bell from 
the Catholic church of Luxor. 

" Twilight and evening bell, and after that the 
dark." 

I sat very still. The light was fading ; 
all the yellow was fading, too, from the 



LUXOR 



97 



columns and the temple walls. I stayed 
till it was dark; and with the dark the 
old gods seemed to resume their inter- 
rupted sway. And surely they, too, called 
to prayer. For do not these ruins of old 
Egypt, like the muezzin upon the minaret, 
like the angelus bell in the church tower, 
call one to prayer in the night ? So won- 
derful are they under stars and moon that 
they stir the fleshly and the worldly de- 
sires that lie like drifted leaves about the 
reverence and the aspiration that are the 
hidden core of the heart. And it is re- 
leased from its burden; and it awakes 
and prays. 

Amun-Ra, Mut, and Khuns, the king 
of the gods, his wife, mother of gods, and 
the moon god, were the Theban triad to 
whom the holy buildings of Thebes on the 
two banks of the Nile were dedicated; 
and this temple of Luxor, the " House of 
Amun in the Southern Apt," was built 
fifteen hundred years before Christ by 
Amenhotep III. Rameses IL, that ve- 



9 8 



LUXOR 



hement builder, added to it immensely. 
One walks among his traces when one 
walks in Luxor. And here, as at Den- 
derah, Christians have let loose the fury 
that should have had no place in their re- 
ligion. Churches for their worship they 
made in different parts of the temple, and 
when they were not praying, they broke 
in pieces statues, defaced bas-reliefs, and 
smashed up shrines with a vigor quite 
as great as that displayed in preservation 
by Christians of to-day. Now time has 
called a truce. Safe are the statues that 
are left. And day by day two great re- 
ligions, almost as if in happy brotherly 
love, send forth their summons by the 
temple walls. And just beyond those 
walls, upon the hill, there is a Coptic 
church. Peace reigns in happy Luxor. 
The lion lies down with the lamb, and the 
child, if it will, may harmlessly put its 
hand into the cockatrice's den. 

Perhaps because it is so surrounded, so 
haunted by life and familiar things, be- 



LUXOR 



99 



cause the pigeons fly about it, the buffalo 
stares into it, the goats stir up the dust 
beside its columns, the twittering voices 
of women make a music near its courts, 
many people pay little heed to this great 
temple, gain but a small impression from 
it. It decorates the bank of the Nile. 
You can see it from the dahabiyehs. For 
many that is enough. Yet the temple is 
a noble one, and, for me, it gains a defi- 
nite attraction all its own from the busy 
life about it, the cheerful hum and stir. 
And if you want fully to realize its dig- 
nity, you can always visit it by night. 
Then the cries from the village are 
hushed. The houses show no lights. 
Only the voices from the Nile steal up to 
the obelisk of Rameses, to the pylon from 
which the flags of Thebes once flew on 
festal days, to the shrine of Alexander 
the Great, with its vultures and its stars, 
and to the red granite statues of Ram- 
eses and his wives. 

These last are as expressive as and of 



IOO 



LUXOR 



course more definite than my dancers. 
They are full of character. They seem 
to breathe out the essence of a vanished 
domesticity. Colossal are the statues of 
the king, solid, powerful, and tremen- 
dous, boldly facing the world with the 
calm of one who was thought, and pos- 
sibly thought himself, to be not much 
less than a deity. And upon each pedes- 
tal, shrinking delicately back, was once 
a little wife. Some little wives are left. 
They are delicious in their modesty. Each 
stands away from the king, shyly, respect- 
fully. Each is so small as to be below his 
down-stretched arm. Each, with a surely 
furtive gesture, reaches out her right 
hand, and attains the swelling calf of her 
noble husband's leg. Plump are their lit- 
tle faces, but not bad-looking. One can- 
not pity the king. Nor does one pity 
them. For these were not " Les desen- 
chantees," the restless, sad-hearted wom- 
en of an Eastern world that knows too 
much. Their longings surely cannot have 



LUXOR 



IOI 



been very great. Their world was prob- 
ably bounded by the calf of Rameses's 
leg. That was " the far horizon " of the 
little plump-faced wives. 

The happy dancers and the humble 
wives, they always come before me with 
the temple of Luxor — joy and discretion 
side by side. And with them, to my ears, 
the two voices seem to come, muezzin and 
angelus bell, mingling not in war, but 
peace. When I think of this temple, I 
think of its joy and peace far less than of 
its majesty. 

And yet it is majestic. Look at it, as 
I have often done, toward sunset from the 
western bank of the Nile, or climb the 
mound beyond its northern end, where 
stands the grand entrance, and you real- 
ize at once its nobility and solemn splen- 
dor. From the Loulia's deck it was a pro- 
cession of great columns; that was all. 
But the decorative effect of these columns, 
soaring above the river and its vivid life, 
is fine. 



102 



LUXOR 



By day all is turmoil on the river-bank. 
Barges are unloading, steamers are ar- 
riving, and throngs of donkey-boys and 
dragomans go down in haste to meet 
them. Servants run to and fro on er- 
rands from the many dahabiyehs. Bath- 
ers leap into the brown waters. The na- 
tive craft pass by with their enormous 
sails outspread to catch the wind, bearing 
serried mobs of men, and black-robed 
women, and laughing, singing children. 
The boatmen of the hotels sing monoto- 
nously as they lounge in the big, white 
boats waiting for travellers to Medinet- 
Abu, to the Ramesseum, to Kurna, and 
the tombs. And just above them rise the 
long lines of columns, ancient, tranquil, 
and remote — infinitely remote, for all their 
nearness, casting down upon the sunlit 
gaiety the long shadow of the past. 

From the edge of the mound where 
stands the native village the effect of the 
temple is much less decorative, but its de- 
tailed grandeur can be better grasped 



LUXOR 



103 



from there; for from there one sees the 
great towers of the propylon, two rows of 
mighty columns, the red granite Obelisk 
of Rameses the Great, and the black gran- 
ite statues of the king. On the right of 
the entrance a giant stands, on the left 
one is seated, and a little farther away a 
third emerges from the ground, which 
reaches to its mighty breast. 

And there the children play perpetually. 
And there the Egyptians sing their sere- 
nades, making the pipes wail and strik- 
ing the derabukkeh ; and there the women 
gossip and twitter like the birds. And the 
buffalo comes to take his sun-bath ; and 
the goats and the curly, brown sheep pass 
in sprightly and calm processions. The 
obelisk there, like its brother in Paris, 
presides over a cheerfulness of life; but 
it is a life that seems akin to it, not alien 
from it. And the king watches the sim- 
plicity of this keen existence of Egypt of 
to-day far up the Nile with a calm that 
one does not fear may be broken by un- 



104 



LUXOR 



sympathetic outrage, or by any vision of 
too perpetual foreign life. For the tour- 
ists each year are but an episode in Up- 
per Egypt. Still the shadoof-man sings 
his ancient song, violent and pathetic, 
bold as the burning sun-rays. Still the 
fellaheen plough with the camel yoked 
with the ox. Still the women are cov- 
ered with protective amulets and hold 
their black draperies in their mouths. 
The intimate life of the Nile remains the 
same. And that life obelisk and king 
have known for how many, many years! 

And so I love to v think of this intimacy 
of life about the temple of the happy 
dancers and the humble little wives, and 
it seems to me to strike the keynote of 
the golden coziness of Luxor. 



COLOSSI OF MEMNON 



IX 



COLOSSI OF MEMNON 

Nevertheless, sometimes one likes to es- 
cape from the thing one loves, and there 
are hours when the gay voices of Luxor 
fatigue the ears, when one desires a great 
calm. Then there are silent voices that 
summon one across the river, when the 
dawn is breaking over the hills of the 
Arabian desert, or when the sun is de- 
clining toward the Libyan mountains — 
voices issuing from lips of stone, from 
the twilight of sanctuaries, from the 
depths of rock-hewn tombs. 

The peace of the plain of Thebes in the 
early morning is very rare and very ex- 
quisite. It is not the peace of the desert, 
but rather, perhaps, the peace of the 
prairie — an atmosphere tender, delicately 
107 



io8 COLOSSI OF MEMNON 



thrilling, softly bright, hopeful in its 
gleaming calm. Often and often have I 
left the Loidia very early, moored against 
the long sand islet that faces Luxor when 
the Nile has not subsided, I have rowed 
across the quiet water that divided me 
from the western bank, and, with a happy 
heart, I have entered into the lovely peace 
of the great spaces that stretch from the 
Colossi of Memnon to the Nile, to the 
mountains, southward toward Armant, 
northward to Kerekten, to Danfik, to 
Gueziret-Meteira. Think of the color of 
young clover, of young barley, of young 
wheat; think of the timbre of the reed 
flute's voice, thin, clear, and frail with 
the frailty of dewdrops; think of the tor- 
rents of spring rushing through the veins 
of a great, wide land, and growing al- 
most still at last on their journey. Spring, 
you will say, perhaps, and high Nile not 
yet subsided! But Egypt is the favored 
land of a spring that is already alert at 
the end of November, and in December is 



COLOSSI OF MEMNON 



pushing forth its green. The Nile has 
sunk away from the feet of the Colossi 
that it has bathed through many days. It 
has freed the plain to the fellaheen, 
though still it keeps my island in its clasp. 
And Hapi, or Kam-wra, the " Great Ex- 
tender/' and Ra, have made this wonder- 
ful spring to bloom on the dark earth 
before the Christian's Christmas. 

What a pastoral it is, this plain of 
Thebes, in the dawn of day! Think of 
the reed flute, I have said, not because 
you will hear it, as you ride toward the 
mountains, but because its voice would be 
utterly in place here, in this arcady of 
Egypt, playing no tarantella, but one of 
those songs, half bird-like, and half 
sadly, mysteriously human, which come 
from the soul of the East. Instead of it, 
you may catch distant cries from the bank 
of the river, where the shadoof-man toils, 
lifting ever the water and his voice, the 
one to earth, the other, it seems, to sky; 
and the creaking lay of the water-wheel, 



no COLOSSI OF MEMNON 



which pervades Upper Egypt like an at- 
mosphere, and which, though perhaps at 
first it irritates, at last seems to you the 
sound of the soul of the river, of the sun- 
shine, and the soil. 

Much of the land looks painted. So 
flat is it, so young are the growing crops, 
that they are like a coating of green paint 
spread over a mighty canvas. But the 
doura rises higher than the heads of the 
naked children who stand among it to 
watch you canter past. And in the far 
distance you see dim groups of trees — 
sycamores and acacias, tamarisks and 
palms. Beyond them is the very heart of 
this " land of sand and ruins and gold " : 
Medinet-Abu, the Ramesseum, Deir-el- 
Medinet, Kurna, Deir-el-Bahari, the 
tombs of the kings, the tombs of the 
queens and of the princes. In the strip 
of bare land at the foot of those hard, 
and yet poetic mountains, have been dug 
up treasures the fame of which has gone 
to the ends of the world. But this plain, 



COLOSSI OF MEMNON in 



where the fellaheen are stooping to the 
soil, and the women are carrying the 
water-jars, and the children are playing 
in the doura, and the oxen and the camels 
are working with ploughs that look like 
relics of far-off days, is the possession of 
the two great presiding beings whom you 
see from an enormous distance, the 
Colossi of Memnon. Amenhotep III. put 
them where they are. So we are told. 
But in this early morning it is not possible 
to think of them as being brought to any 
place. Seated, the one beside the other, 
facing the Nile and the home of the rising 
sun, their immense aspect of patience sug- 
gests will, calmly, steadily exercised, sug- 
gests choice ; that, for some reason, as yet 
unknown, they chose to come to this plain, 
that they choose solemnly to remain there, 
waiting, while the harvests grow and are 
gathered about their feet, while the Nile 
rises and subsides, while the years and the 
generations come, like the harvests, and 
are stored away in the granaries of the 



ii2 COLOSSI OF MEMNON 



past. Their calm broods over this plain, 
gives to it a personal atmosphere which 
sets it quite apart from every other flat 
space of the world. There is no place that 
I know on the earth which has the pecu- 
liar, bright, ineffable calm of the plain of 
these Colossi. It takes you into its breast, 
and you lie there in the growing sunshine 
almost as if you were a child laid in the 
lap of one of them. That legend of the 
singing at dawn of the " vocal Memnon," 
how could it have arisen? How could 
such calmness sing, such patience ever find 
a voice? Unlike the Sphinx, which be- 
comes ever more impressive as you draw 
near to it, and is most impressive when 
you sit almost at its feet, the Colossi lose 
in personality as you approach them and 
can see how they have been defaced. 

From afar one feels their minds, their 
strange, unearthly temperaments com- 
manding this pastoral. When you are be- 
side them, this feeling disappears. Their 
features are gone, and though in their 



COLOSSI OF MEMNON 113 



attitudes there is power, and there is 
something that awakens awe, they are 
more wonderful as a far-off feature of 
the plain. They gain in grandeur from 
the night, in strangeness from the moon- 
rise, perhaps specially when the Nile comes 
to their feet. More than three thousand 
years old, they look less eternal than the 
Sphinx. Like them, the Sphinx is wait- 
ing, but with a greater purpose. The 
Sphinx reduces man really to nothing- 
ness. The Colossi leave him some rem- 
nants of individuality. One can conceive 
of Strabo and ^Elius Gallus, of Hadrian 
and Sabina, of others who came over the 
sunlit land to hear the unearthly song in 
the dawn, being of some — not much, but 
still of some — importance here. Before 
the Sphinx no one is important. But in 
the distance of the plain the Colossi shed 
a real magic of calm and solemn person- 
ality, and subtly seem to mingle their 
spirit with the flat, green world, so wide, 
so still, so fecund, and so peaceful; with 



ii4 COLOSSI OF MEMNON 



the soft airs that are surely scented with 
an eternal springtime, and with the light 
that the morning rains down on wheat 
and clover, on Indian corn and barley, and 
on brown men laboring, who, perhaps, 
from the patience of the Colossi in repose 
have drawn a patience in labor that has 
in it something not less sublime. 

From the Colossi one goes onward to- 
ward the trees and the mountains, and 
very soon one comes to the edge of that 
strange and fascinating strip of barren 
land which is strewn with temples and 
honeycombed with tombs. The sun burns 
down on it. The heat seems thrown back 
upon it by the wall of tawny mountains 
that bounds it on the west. It is dusty, it 
is arid; it is haunted by swarms of flies, 
by the guardians of the ruins, and by men 
and boys trying to sell enormous scarabs 
and necklaces and amulets, made yester- 
day, and the day before, in the manufac- 
tory of Kurna. From many points it 
looks not unlike a strangely prolonged 



COLOSSI OF MEMNON 115 



rubbish-heap in which busy giants have 
been digging with huge spades, making 
mounds and pits, caverns and trenches, 
piling up here a monstrous heap of stones, 
casting down there a mighty statue. But 
how it fascinates! Of course one knows 
what it means. One knows that on this 
strip of land Naville dug out at Deir-el- 
Bahari the temple of Mentu-hotep, and 
discovered later, in her shrine, Hathor, 
the cow-goddess, with the lotus-plants 
streaming from her sacred forehead to 
her feet; that long before him Mariette 
here brought to the light at Drah-abu'l- 
Neggah the treasures of kings of the 
twelfth and thirteenth dynasties; that at 
the foot of those tiger-colored precipices 
Theodore M. Davis the American found 
the sepulchre of Queen Hatshepsu, the 
Queen Elizabeth of the old Egyptian 
world, and, later, the tomb of Yuaa and 
Thuaa, the parents of Queen Thiy, con- 
taining mummy-cases covered with gold, 
jars of oil and wine, gold, silver, and ala- 



n6 COLOSSI OF MEMNON 



baster boxes, a bed decorated with gilded 
ivory, a chair with gilded plaster reliefs, 
chairs of state, and a chariot; that here 
Maspero, Victor Loret, Brugsch Bey, and 
other patient workers gave to the world 
tombs that had been hidden and unknown 
for centuries; that there to the north is 
the temple of Kurna, and over there 
the Ramesseum; that those rows of little 
pillars close under the mountain, and look- 
ing strangely modern, are the pillars of 
Hatshepsu's temple, which bears upon its 
walls the pictures of the expedition to the 
historic land of Punt; that the kings were 
buried there, and there the queens and 
the princes of the vanished dynasties; 
that beyond to the west is the temple of 
Deir-el-Medinet with its judgment of the 
dead; that here by the native village is 
Medinet-Abu. One knows that, and so 
the imagination is awake, ready to paint 
the lily and to gild the beaten gold. But 
even if one did not know, I think one 
would be fascinated. This turmoil of sun- 



COLOSSI OF MEMNON 117 



baked earth and rock, grey, yellow, pink, 
orange, and red, awakens the curiosity, 
summons the love of the strange, sug- 
gests that it holds secrets to charm the 
souls of men. 



MEDINET-ABU 



X 



MEDXNET-ABU 

At the entrance to the temple of Medinet- 
Abu, near the small groups of palms and 
the few brown houses, often have I turned 
and looked back across the plain before 
entering through the first beautiful door- 
way, to see the patient backs and right 
sides of the Colossi, the far-off, dreamy 
mountains beyond Karnak and the Nile. 
And again, when I have entered and 
walked a little distance, I have looked back 
at the almost magical picture framed in 
the doorway; at the bottom of the pic- 
ture a layer of brown earth, then a strip 
of sharp green — the cultivated ground — 
then a blur of pale yellow, then a dark- 
ness of trees, and just the hint of a hill 
far, very far away. And always, in look- 
121 



122 MEDINET-ABU 



ing, I have thought of the " Sposalizio " 
of Raphael in the Brera at Milan, of the 
tiny dream of blue country framed by his 
temple doorway beyond the Virgin and 
Saint Joseph. The doorways of the tem- 
ples of Egypt are very noble, and no- 
where have I been more struck by their 
nobility than in Medinet-Abu. Set in huge 
walls of massive masonry, which rise 
slightly above them on each side, with a 
projecting cornice, in their simplicity they 
look extraordinarily classical, in their 
sobriety mysterious, and in their great 
solidity quite wonderfully elegant. And 
they always suggest to me that they are 
giving access to courts and chambers 
which still, even in our times, are dedi- 
cated to secret cults — to the cults of Isis, 
of Hathor, and of Osiris. 

Close to the right of the front of Medi- 
net-Abu there are trees covered with yel- 
low flowers; beyond are fields of doura. 
Behind the temple is a sterility which 
makes one think of metal. A great calm 



MEDINET-ABU 



enfolds this place. The buildings are of 
the same color as the Colossi. When I 
speak of the buildings, I include the great 
temple, the pavilion of Rameses III., and 
the little temple, which together may be 
said to form Medinet-Abu. Whereas the 
temple of Luxor seems to open its arms 
to life, and the great fascination of the 
Ramesseum comes partly from its inva- 
sion by every travelling air and happy 
sun-ray, its openness and freedom, Medi- 
net-Abu impresses by its colossal air of 
secrecy, by its fortress-like seclusion. Its 
walls are immensely thick, and are cov- 
ered with figures the same color as the 
walls, some of them very tall. Thick-set, 
massive, heavy, almost warlike it is. Two 
seated statues within, statues with ani- 
mals' faces, steel-colored, or perhaps a 
little darker than that, look like savage 
warders ready to repel intrusion. 

Passing between them, delicately as 
Agag, one enters an open space with 
ruins, upon the right of which is a low, 



124 MEDINET-ABU 



small temple, grey in hue, and covered 
with inscriptions, which looks almost 
bowed under its tremendous weight of 
years. From this dignified, though tiny, 
veteran there comes a perpetual sound of 
birds. The birds in Egypt have no rever- 
ence for age. Never have I seen them 
more restless, more gay, or more imperti- 
nent, than in the immemorial ruins of this 
ancient land. Beyond is an enormous por- 
tal, on the lofty ceiling of which still lin- 
ger traces of faded red and blue, which 
gives access to a great hall with rows of 
mighty columns, those on the left hand 
round, those on the right square, and al- 
most terribly massive. There is in these 
no grace, as in the giant lotus columns of 
Karnak. Prodigious, heavy, barbaric, 
they are like a hymn in stone to Strength. 
There is something brutal in their aspect, 
which again makes one think of war, of 
assaults repelled, hordes beaten back like 
waves by a sea-wall. And still another 
great hall, with more gigantic columns, 



MEDINET-ABU 125 



lies in the sun beyond, and a doorway 
through which seems to stare fiercely the 
edge of a hard and fiery mountain. Al- 
though one is roofed by the sky, there is 
something oppressive here ; an imprisoned 
feeling comes over one. I could never be 
fond of Medinet-Abu, as I am fond of 
Luxor, of parts of Karnak, of the whole 
of delicious, poetical Philse. The big py- 
lons, with their great walls sloping in- 
ward, sand-colored, and glowing with very 
pale yellow in the sun, the resistant walls, 
the brutal columns, the huge and almost 
savage scale of everything, always remind 
me of the violence in men, and also — I 
scarcely know why — make me think of 
the North, of sullen Northern castles by 
the sea, in places where skies are grey, 
and the white of foam and snow is mar- 
ried in angry nights. 

And yet in Medinet-Abu there reigns a 
splendid calm — a calm that sometimes 
seems massive, resistant, as the columns 
and the walls. Peace is certainly inclosed 



126 



MEDINET-ABU 



by the stones that call up thoughts of war, 
as if, perhaps, their purpose had been 
achieved many centuries ago, and they 
were quit of enemies for ever. Rameses 
III. is connected with Medinet-Abu. He 
was one of the greatest of the Egyptian 
kings, and has been called the " last of 
the great sovereigns of Egypt/' He ruled 
for thirty-one years, and when, after a 
first visit to Medinet-Abu, I looked into 
his records, I was interested to find that 
his conquests and his wars had " a char- 
acter essentially defensive." This defen- 
sive spirit is incarnated in the stones of 
these ruins. One reads in them some- 
thing of the soul of this king who lived 
twelve hundred years before Christ, and 
who desired, " in remembrance of his 
Syrian victories/' to give to his memorial 
temple an outward military aspect. I no- 
ticed a military aspect at once inside this 
temple; but if you circle the buildings 
outside it is more unmistakable. For the 
east front has a battlemented wall, and 



MEDINET-ABU 127 



the battlements are shield-shaped. This 
fortress, or migdol, a name which the an- 
cient Egyptians borrowed from the no- 
madic tribes of Syria, is called the " Pa- 
vilion of Rameses III.," and his principal 
battles are represented upon its walls. 
The monarch does not hesitate to speak 
of himself in terms of praise, suggesting 
that he was like the God Mentu, who was 
the Egyptian war god, and whose cult 
at Thebes was at one period more import- 
ant even than was the cult of Amun, and 
also plainly hinting that he was a brave 
fellow. " I, Rameses the King," he mur- 
murs, " behaved as a hero who knows his 
worth." If hieroglyphs are to be trusted, 
various Egyptian kings of ancient times 
seem to have had some vague suspicion 
of their own value, and the walls of Medi- 
net-Abu are, to speak sincerely, one 
mighty boast. In his later years the king 
lived in peace and luxury, surrounded by 
a vicious and intriguing Court, haunted 
by magicians, hags, and mystery-mon- 



128 MEDINET-ABU 



gers. Dealers in magic may still be 
found on the other side of the river, in 
happy Luxor. I made the acquaintance of 
two when I was there, one of whom of- 
fered for a couple of pounds to provide 
me with a preservative against all such 
dangers as beset the traveller in wild 
places. In order to prove its efficacy he 
asked me to come to his house by night, 
bringing a dog and my revolver with me. 
He would hang the charm about the dog's 
neck, and I was then to put six shots into 
the animal's body. He positively assured 
me that the dog would be uninjured. I 
half-promised to come, and, when night 
began to fall, looked vaguely about for 
a dog. At last I found one, but it howled 
so dismally when I asked Ibrahim Ayyad 
to take possession of it for experimental 
purposes, that I weakly gave up the 
project, and left the magician clamor- 
ing for his hundred and ninety-five 
piastres. 

Its warlike aspect gives a special per- 



MEDINET-ABU 



129 



sonality to Medinet-Abu. The shield- 
shaped battlements; the courtyards, with 
their brutal columns, narrowing as they 
recede toward the mountains; the heavy 
gateways, with superimposed chambers; 
the towers; quadrangular bastion to pro- 
tect, inclined basement to resist the at- 
tacks of sappers and cause projectiles to 
rebound — all these things contribute to 
this very definite effect. 

I have heard travellers on the Nile 
speak piteously of the confusion wakened 
in their minds by a hurried survey of 
many temples, statues, monuments, and 
tombs. But if one stays long enough this 
confusion fades happily away, and one 
differentiates between the antique person- 
alities of Ancient Egypt almost as easily 
as one differentiates between the person- 
alities of one's familiar friends. Among 
these personalities Medinet-Abu is the 
warrior, standing like Mentu, with the 
solar disk, and the two plumes erect 
above his head of a hawk, firmly planted 



130 MEDINET-ABU 

at the foot of the Theban mountains, 
ready to repel all enemies, to beat back 
all assaults, strong and determined, 
powerful and brutally serene. 



THE RAMESSEUM 



XI 



THE RAMESSEUM 

" This, my lord, is the thinking-place of 
Rameses the Great/' 

So said Ibrahim Ayyad to me one 
morning — Ibrahim, who is almost as pro- 
lific in the abrupt creation of peers as if 
he were a democratic government. 

I looked about me. We stood in a 
ruined hall with columns, architraves cov- 
ered with inscriptions, segments of flat 
roof. Here and there traces of painting, 
dull-red, pale, ethereal blue — the " love- 
color " of Egypt, as the Egyptians often 
call it — still adhered to the stone. This 
hall, dignified, grand, but happy, was 
open on all sides to the sun and air. From 
it I could see tamarisk- and acacia-trees, 
and far-off shadowy mountains beyond 
the eastern verge of the Nile. And the 
133 



134 THE RAMESSEUM 



trees were still as carven things in an at- 
mosphere that was a miracle of clearness 
and of purity. Behind me, and near, the 
hard Libyan mountains gleamed in the 
sun. Somewhere a boy was singing; and 
suddenly his singing died away. And I 
thought of the " Lay of the Harper " 
which is inscribed upon the tombs of 
Thebes — those tombs under those gleam- 
ing mountains: 

" For no one carries away his goods with him ; 
Yea, no one returns again who has gone thither." 

It took the place of the song that had 
died as I thought of the great king's 
glory; that he had been here, and had 
long since passed away. 

" The thinking-place of Rameses the 
Great!" 

" Suttinly." 

" You must leave me alone here, Ibra- 
him/' 

I watched his gold-colored robe vanish 
into the gold of the sun through the cop- 
per color of the columns. And I was quite 



THE RAMESSEUM 



alone in the " thinking-place " of Ram- 
eses. It was a brilliant day, the sky dark 
sapphire blue, without even the spectre of 
a cloud, or any airy, vaporous veil; the 
heat already intense in the full sunshine, 
but delicious if one slid into a shadow. I 
slid into a shadow, and sat down on a 
warm block of stone. And the silence 
flowed upon me — the silence of the Ram- 
esseum. 

Was Horbehutet, the winged disk, with 
crowned urcei, ever set up above this tem- 
ple's principal door to keep it from de- 
struction? I do not know. But, if he 
was, he failed perfectly to fulfil his mis- 
sion. And I am glad he failed. I am 
glad of the ruin that is here, glad that 
walls have crumbled or been overthrown, 
that columns have been cast down, and 
ceilings torn off from the pillars that sup- 
ported them, letting in the sky. I would 
have nothing different in the thinking- 
place of Rameses. 

Like a cloud, a great golden cloud, a 



136 THE RAMESSEUM 



glory impending that will not, cannot, be 
dissolved into the ether, he loomed over 
the Egypt that is dead, he looms over the 
Egypt of to-day. Everywhere you meet 
his traces, everywhere you hear his name. 
You say to a tall young Egyptian : " How 
big you are growing, Hassan ! " 

He answers, " Come back next year, 
my gentleman, and I shall be like Ram- 
eses the Great." 

Or you ask of the boatman who rows 
you, " How can you pull all day against 
the current of the Nile ? " And he smiles, 
and lifting his brown arm, he says to 
you : " Look ! I am strong as Rameses 
the Great." 

This familiar fame comes down through 
some three thousand, two hundred . and 
twenty years. Carved upon limestone and 
granite, now it seems engraven also on 
every Egyptian heart that beats not only 
with the movement of shadoof, or is not 
buried in the black soil fertilized by Hapi. 
Thus can inordinate vanity prolong the 



THE RAMESSEUM 137 

true triumph of genius, and impress its 
own view of itself upon the minds of mil- 
lions. This Rameses is believed to be the 
Pharaoh who oppressed the children of 
Israel. 

As I sat in the Ramesseum that morn- 
ing, I recalled his face — the face of an 
artist and a dreamer rather than that of 
a warrior and oppressor; Asiatic, hand- 
some, not insensitive, not cruel, but subtle, 
aristocratic, and refined. I could imagine 
it bending above the little serpents of the 
sistrum as they lifted their melodious 
voices to bid Typhon depart, or watching 
the dancing women's rhythmic move- 
ments, or smiling half kindly, half with 
irony, upon the lovelorn maiden who made 
her plaint: 

" What is sweet to the mouth, to me is as the 
gall of birds ; 
Thy breath alone can comfort my heart." 

And I could imagine it looking pro- 
foundly grave, not sad, among the col- 
umns with their opening lotus flowers. 



138 THE RAMESSEUM 



For it is the hall of lotus columns that 
Ibrahim calls the thinking-place of the 
king. 

There is something both lovely and 
touching to me in the lotus columns of 
Egypt, in the tall masses of stone opening 
out into flowers near the sun. Near the 
sun! Yes; only that obvious falsehood 
will convey to those who have not seen 
them the effect of some of the hypostyle 
halls, the columns of which seem literally 
soaring to the sky. And flowers of stone, 
you will say, rudely carved and rugged! 
That does not matter. There was poetry 
in the minds that conceived them, in the 
thought that directed the hands which 
shaped them and placed them where they 
are. In Egypt perpetually one feels how 
the ancient Egyptians loved the Nymphcea 
lotus, which is the white lotus, and the 
Nymphcea coeruloea, the lotus that is blue. 
Did they not place Horus in its cup, and 
upon the head of Nefer-Tum, the nature 
god, who represented in their mythology 



THE RAMESSEUM 139 



the heat of the rising sun, and who seems 
to have been credited with power to grant 
life in the world to come, set it as a sort 
of regal ornament? To Seti L, when he 
returned in glory from his triumphs over 
the Syrians, were given bouquets of lotus- 
blossoms by the great officers of his house- 
hold. The tiny column of green feldspar 
ending in the lotus typified eternal youth, 
even as the carnelian buckle typified the 
blood of Isis, which washed away all sin. 
Kohl pots were fashioned in the form of 
the lotus, cartouches sprang from it, wine 
flowed from cups shaped like it. The 
lotus was part of the very life of Egypt, 
as the rose, the American Beauty rose, is 
part of our social life of to-day. And 
here, in the Ramesseum, I found campani- 
form, or lotus-flower capitals on the col- 
umns — here where Rameses once perhaps 
dreamed of his Syrian campaigns, or of 
that famous combat when, " like Baal in 
his fury/' he fought single-handed against 
the host of the Hittites massed in two 



140 THE RAMESSEUM 



thousand, five hundred chariots to over- 
throw him. 

The Ramesseum is a temple not of 
winds, but of soft and kindly airs. There 
comes Zephyrus, whispering love to Flora 
incarnate in the Lotus. To every sun- 
beam, to every little breeze, the ruins 
stretch out arms. They adore the deep- 
blue sky, the shining, sifted sand, untram- 
melled nature, all that whispers, " Free- 
dom." 

So I felt that day when Ibrahim left 
me, so I feel always when I sit in the 
Ramesseum, that exultant victim of 
Time's here not sacrilegious hand. 

All strong souls cry out secretly for 
liberty as for a sacred necessity of life. 
Liberty seems to drench the Ramesseum. 
And all strong souls must exult there. 
The sun has taken it as a beloved posses- 
sion. No massy walls keep him out. No 
shield-shaped battlements rear themselves 
up against the outer world as at Medinet- 
Abu. No huge pylons cast down upon 



THE RAMESSEUM 



the ground their forms in darkness. The 
stone glows with the sun, seems almost to 
have a soul glowing with the sense, the 
sun-ray sense, of freedom. The heart 
leaps up in the Ramesseum, not frivol- 
ously, but with a strange, sudden knowl- 
edge of the depths of passionate joy there 
are in life and in bountiful, glorious na- 
ture. Instead of the strength of a prison, 
one feels the ecstasy of space; instead of 
the safety of inclosure, the rapture of 
naked publicity. But the public to whom 
this place of the great king is consigned 
is a public of Theban hills; of the sun- 
beams striking from them over the wide 
world toward the east; of light airs, of 
drifting sand grains, of singing birds, 
and of butterflies with pure white wings. 
If you have ever ridden an Arab horse, 
mounted in the heart of an oasis, to the 
verge of the great desert, you will remem- 
ber the bound, thrilling with fiery anima- 
tion, which he gives when he sets his feet 
on the sand beyond the last tall date- 



142 THE RAMESSEUM 



palms. A bound like that the soul gives 
when you sit in the Ramesseum, and see 
the crowding sunbeams, the far-off groves 
of palm-trees, and the drowsy mountains, 
like shadows, that sleep beyond the Nile. 
And you look up, perhaps, as I looked that 
morning, and upon a lotus column near 
you, relieved, you perceive the figure of a 
young man singing. 

A young man singing ! Let him be the 
tutelary god of this place, whoever he be, 
whether only some humble, happy slave, 
or the " superintendent of song and of the 
recreation of the king." Rather even than 
Amun-Ra let him be the god. For there 
is something nobly joyous in this archi- 
tecture, a dignity that sings. 

It has been said, but not established, 
that Rameses the Great was buried in the 
Ramesseum, and when first I entered it 
the " Lay of the Harper " came to my 
mind, with the sadness that attends the 
passing away of glory into the shades of 
death. But an optimism almost as de- 



THE RAMESSEUM 143 



termined as Emerson's was quickly bred 
in me there. I could not be sad, though 
I could be happily thoughtful, in the light 
of the Ramesseum. And even when I left 
the thinking-place, and, coming down the 
central aisle, saw in the immersing sun- 
shine of the Osiride Court the fallen col- 
ossus of the king, I was not struck to sad- 
ness. 

Imagine the greatest figure in the 
world — such a figure as this Rameses was 
in his day — with all might, all glory, all 
climbing power, all vigor, tenacity of pur- 
pose, and granite strength of will con- 
centrated within it, struck suddenly down, 
and falling backward in a collapse of 
which the thunder might shake the vitals 
of the earth, and you have this prostrate 
colossus. Even now one seems to hear 
it fall, to feel the warm soil trembling be- 
neath one's feet as one approaches it. A 
row of statues of enormous size, with 
arms crossed as if in resignation, glowing 
in the sun, in color not gold or amber, 



144 THE RAMESSEUM 



but a delicate, desert yellow, watch near 
it like servants of the dead. On a slightly 
lower level than there it lies, and a little 
nearer the Nile. Only the upper half of 
the figure is left, but its size is really ter- 
rific. This colossus was fifty-seven feet 
high. It weighed eight hundred tons. 
Eight hundred tons of syenite went to 
its making, and across the shoulders its 
breadth is, or w r as, over twenty-two feet. 
But one does not think of measurements 
as one looks upon it. It is stupendous. 
That is obvious and that is enough. Nor 
does one think of its finish, of its beauti- 
ful, rich colour, of any of its details. One 
thinks of it as a tremendous personage 
laid low, as the mightiest of the mighty 
fallen. One thinks of it as the dead Ram- 
eses whose glory still looms over Egypt 
like a golden cloud that will not disperse. 
One thinks of it as the soul that com- 
manded, and, lo! there rose up above the 
sands, at the foot of the hills of Thebes, 
the exultant Ramesseum. 



DEIR-EL-BAHARI 



XII 



DEIR-EL-BAHARI 

Place; for Queen Hatshepsu! Surely 
she comes to a sound of flutes, a merry 
noise of thin, bright music, backed by a 
clashing of barbaric cymbals, along the 
corridors of the past; this queen who is 
shown upon Egyptian walls dressed as a 
man, who is said to have worn a beard, 
and who sent to the land of Punt the 
famous expedition which covered her with 
glory and brought gold to the god Amun. 
To me most feminine she seemed when I 
saw her temple at Deir-el-Bahari, with 
its brightness and its suavity; its pretty 
shallowness and sunshine; its white, and 
blue, and yellow, and red, and green and 
orange ; all very trim and fanciful, all very 
smart and delicate; full of finesse and 
laughter, and breathing out to me of the 
147 



148 DEIR-EL-BAHARI 



twentieth century the coquetry of a wom- 
an in 1500 b. c. After the terrific mas- 
culinity of Medinet-Abu, after the great 
freedom of the Ramesseum, and the 
grandeur of its colossus, the manhood of 
all the ages concentrated in granite, the 
temple at Deir-el-Bahari came upon me 
like a delicate woman, perfumed and ar- 
ranged, clothed in a creation of white and 
blue and orange, standing — ever so know- 
ingly — against a background of orange 
and pink, of red and of brown-red, a smil- 
ing coquette of the mountain, a gay and 
sweet enchantress who knew her pretty 
powers and meant to exercise them. 

Hatshepsu with a beard! Never will 
I believe it. Or if she ever seemed to 
wear one, I will swear it was only the tat- 
tooed ornament with which all the lovely 
women of the Fayum decorate their chins 
to-day, throwing into relief the smiling, 
soft lips, the delicate noses, the liquid eyes, 
and leading one from it step by step to 
the beauties it precedes. 



DEIR-EL-BAHARX 149 



Mr. Wallis Budge says in his book on 
the antiquities of Egypt : " It would be 
unjust to the memory of a great man and 
a loyal servant of Hatshepsu, if we omit- 
ted to mention the name of Senmut, the 
architect and overseer of works at Deir- 
el-Bahari." By all means let Senmut be 
mentioned, and then let him be utterly for- 
gotten. A radiant queen reigns here — a 
queen of fantasy and splendor, and of that 
divine shallowness — refined frivolity lit- 
erally cut into the mountain — which is the 
note of Deir-el-Bahari. And what a 
clever background ! Oh, Hatshepsu knew 
what she was doing when she built her 
temple here. It was not the solemn Sen- 
mut (he wore a beard, I'm sure) who 
chose that background, if I know any- 
thing of women. 

Long before I visited Deir-el-Bahari 
I had looked at it from afar. My eyes 
had been drawn to it merely from its sit- 
uation right underneath the mountains. I 
had asked : " What do those little pillars 



DEIR-EL-BAHARI 



mean? And are those little doors?" I 
had promised myself to go there, as one 
promises oneself a bonne bouche to finish 
a happy banquet. And I had realized the 
subtlety, essentially feminine, that had 
placed a temple there. And Menu-Ho- 
tep's temple, perhaps you say, was it not 
there before the queen's? Then he must 
have possessed a subtlety purely femi- 
nine, or have been advised by one of his 
wives in his building operations, or by 
some favorite female slave. Blundering, 
unsubtle man would probably think that 
the best way to attract and to fix atten- 
tion on any object was to make it much 
bigger than things near and around it, 
to set up a giant among dwarfs. 

Not so Queen Hatshepsu. More art- 
ful in her generation, she set her long but 
little temple against the precipices of 
Libya. And what is the result? Simply 
that whenever one looks toward them one 
says, " What are those little pillars ? w 
Or if one is more instructed, one thinks 



DEIR-EL-BAHARI 151 



about Queen Hatshepsu. The precipices 
are as nothing. A woman's wile has blot- 
ted them out. 

And yet how grand they are! I have 
called them tiger-colored precipices. And 
they suggest tawny wild beasts, fierce, 
bred in a land that is the prey of the sun. 
Every shade of orange and yellow glows 
and grows pale on their bosses, in their 
clefts. They shoot out turrets of rock 
that blaze like flames in the day. They 
show great teeth, like the tiger when any 
one draws near. And, like the tiger, they 
seem perpetually informed by a spirit that 
is angry. Blake wrote of the tiger : 

" Tiger, tiger, burning bright 
In the forests of the night." 

These tiger-precipices of Libya are burn- 
ing things, avid like beasts of prey. But 
the restored apricot-coloured pillars are 
not afraid of their impending fury — fury 
of a beast baffled by a tricky little woman, 
almost it seems to me ; and still less afraid 



152 DEIR-EL-BAHARI 



are the white pillars, and the brilliant 
paintings that decorate the walls within. 

As many people in the sad but lovely 
islands off the coast of Scotland believe 
in " doubles," as the old classic writers 
believed in man's " genius," so the an- 
cient Egyptian believed in his " Ka," or 
separate entity, a sort of spiritual other 
self, to be propitiated and ministered to, 
presented with gifts, and served with en- 
ergy and ardor. On this temple of Deir- 
el-Bahari is the scene of the birth of Hat- 
shepsu, and there are two babies, the prin- 
cess and her Ka. For this imagined Ka, 
when a great queen, long after, she built 
this temple, or chapel, that offerings might 
be made there on certain appointed days. 
Fortunate Ka of Hatshepsu to have had 
so cheerful a dwelling! Liveliness per- 
vades Deir-el-Bahari. I remember, when 
I was on my first visit to Egypt, lunching 
at Thebes with Monsieur Naville and Mr. 
Hogarth, and afterward going with them 
to watch the digging away of the masses 



DEIR-EL-BAHARI 



of sand and rubbish which concealed this 
gracious building. I remember the songs 
of the half-naked workmen toiling and 
sweating in the sun. And I remember 
seeing a white temple wall come up into 
the light with all the painted figures surely 
dancing with joy upon it. And they are 
surely dancing still. 

Here you may see, brilliant as yester- 
day's picture anywhere, fascinatingly dec- 
orative trees growing bravely in little pots, 
red people offering incense which is piled 
up in mounds like mountains, Ptah-Seket, 
Osiris receiving a royal gift of wine, the 
queen in the company of various divini- 
ties, and the terrible ordeal of the cows. 
The cows are being weighed in scales. 
There are three of them. One is a phil- 
osopher, and reposes with an air that says, 
" Even this last indignity of being 
weighed against my will cannot perturb 
my soaring spirit/' But the other two, 
sitting up, look as apprehensive as old 
ladies in a rocking express, expectant of 



154 DEIR-EL-BAHARI 



an accident. The vividness of the colours 
in this temple is quite wonderful. And 
much of its great attraction comes rather 
from its position, and from them, than es- 
sentially from itself. At Deir-el-Bahari, 
what the long shell contains — its happy 
murmur of life — is more fascinating than 
the shell. There, instead of being up- 
lifted or overawed by form, we are re- 
joiced by colour, by the high vivacity of 
arrested movement, by the story that col- 
our and movement tell. And over all there 
is the bright, blue, painted sky, studded, 
almost distractedly studded, with a ple- 
thora of the yellow stars the Egyptians 
made like starfish. 

The restored apricot-coloured columns 
outside look unhappily suburban when you 
are near them. The white columns with 
their architraves are more pleasant to the 
eyes. The niches full of bright hues, the 
arched chapels, the small white steps lead- 
ing upward to shallow sanctuaries, the 
small black foxes facing each other on lit- 



DEIR-EL-BAHARI 



tie yellow pedestals — attract one like the 
details and amusing ornaments of a clever 
woman's boudoir. Through this most 
characteristic temple one roves in a gaily 
attentive mood, feeling all the time Hat- 
shepsu's fascination. 

You may see her, if you will, a little 
lady on the wall, with a face decidedly 
sensual — a long, straight nose, thick lips, 
an expression rather determined than 
agreeable. Her mother looks as Semitic 
as a Jew moneylender in Brick Lane, Lon- 
don. Her husband, Thothmes II. > has a 
weak and poor-spirited countenance — de- 
cidedly an accomplished performer on the 
second violin. The mother wears on her 
head a snake, no doubt a cobra-di-capello, 
the symbol of her sovereignty. Thoth- 
mes is clad in a loin-cloth. And a god, 
with a sleepy expression and a very fish- 
like head, appears in this group of per- 
sonages to offer the key of life. Another 
painting of the queen shows her on her 
knees drinking milk from the sacred cow, 



156 DEIR-EL-BAHARI 



with an intent and greedy figure, and an 
extraordinarily sensual and expressive 
face. That she was well guarded is surely 
proved by a brave display of her soldiers 
— red men on a white wall. Full of life 
and gaiety, all in a row they come, hold- 
ing weapons, and, apparently, branches, 
and advancing with a gait of triumph 
that tells of " spacious days." And at 
their head is an officer, who looks back, 
much like a modern drill sergeant, to see 
how his men are marching. 

In the southern shrine of the temple, 
cut in the rock as is the northern shrine, 
once more I found traces of the " Lady 
of the Under-World." For this shrine 
was dedicated to Hathor, though the 
whole temple was sacred to the Theban 
god Amun. Upon a column were the re- 
mains of the goddess's face, with a broad 
brow and long, large eyes. Some fanatic 
had hacked away the mouth. 

The tomb of Hatshepsu was found by 
Mr. Theodore M. Davis, and the famous 



DEIR-EL-BAHARI 157 



Vache of Deir-el-Bahari by Monsieur 
Naville as lately as 1905. It stands in 
the museum at Cairo, but for ever it will 
be connected in the minds of men with 
the tiger-coloured precipices and the Col- 
onnades of Thebes. Behind the ruins of 
the temple of Mentu-Hotep III., in a 
chapel of painted rock, the Vache-Hathor 
was found. 

It is not easy to convey by any descrip- 
tion the impression this marvellous statue 
makes. Many of us love our dogs, our 
horses, some of us adore our cats; but 
which of us can think, without a smile, 
of worshipping a cow ? Yet the cow was 
the Egyptian Aphrodite's sacred animal. 
Under the form of a cow she was often 
represented. And in the statue she is pre- 
sented to us as a limestone cow. And 
positively this cow is to be worshipped. 

She is shown in the act apparently of 
stepping gravely forward out of a small 
arched shrine, the walls of which are dec- 
orated with brilliant paintings. Her colour 



1 58 DEIR-EL-BAHARI 



is red and yellowish red, and is covered 
with dark blotches of very dark green, 
which look almost black. Only one or two 
are of a bluish colour. Her height is 
moderate. I stand about five foot nine, 
and I found that on her pedestal the line 
of her back was about level with my chest. 
The lower part of the body, much of 
w r hich is concealed by the under block of 
limestone, is white, tinged with yellow. 
The tail is red. Above the head, open and 
closed lotus-flowers form a head-dress, 
with the lunar disk and two feathers. 
And the long lotus-stalks flow down on 
each side of the neck toward the ground. 
At the back of this head-dress are a 
scarab and a cartouche. The goddess is 
advancing solemnly and gently. A won- 
derful calm, a matchless, serene dignity, 
enfold her. 

In the body of this cow one is able, in- 
deed one is almost obliged, to feel the soul 
of a goddess. The incredible is accom- 
plished. The dead Egyptian makes the 



DEIR-EL-BAHARI 



ironic, the sceptical modern world feel 
deity in a limestone cow. How is it done ? 
I know not; but it is done. Genius can 
do nearly anything, it seems. Under the 
chin of the cow there is a standing statue 
of the King Mentu-Hotep, and beneath 
her the king kneels as a boy. Wonder- 
fully expressive and solemnly refined is the 
cow's face, which is of a dark colour, like 
the colour of almost black earth — earth 
fertilised by the Nile. Dignified, dom- 
inating, almost but just not stern, strongly 
intelligent, and, through its beautiful in- 
telligence, entirely sympathetic ( " to un- 
derstand all, is to pardon all "), this face, 
once thoroughly seen, completely noticed, 
can never be forgotten. This is one of 
the most beautiful statues in the world. 

When I was at Deir-el-Bahari I thought 
of it and wished that it still stood there 
near the Colonnades of Thebes under the 
tiger-coloured precipices. And then I 
thought of Hatshepsu. Surely she could 
not brook a rival to-day near the temple 



i6o DEIR-EL-BAHARI 



which she made — a rival long lost and 
long forgotten. Is not her influence still 
there upon the terraced platforms, among 
the apricot and the white columns, near 
the paintings of the land of Punt? Did 
it not whisper to the antiquaries, even to 
the soldiers from Cairo, who guarded the 
Vache-Hathor in the night, to make haste 
to take her away far from the hills of 
Thebes and from the Nile's long southern 
reaches, that the great queen might once 
more reign alone? They obeyed. Hat- 
shepsu was appeased. And, like a deli- 
cate woman, perfumed and arranged, 
clothed in a creation of white and blue 
and orange, standing ever so knowingly 
against a background of orange and pink, 
of red and of brown-red, she rules at Deir- 
el-Bahari. 



THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS 



XIII 



THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS 

On the way to the tombs of the kings I 
went to the temple of Kurna, that lonely 
cenotaph, with its sand-coloured, massive 
fagade, its heaps of fallen stone, its wide 
and ruined doorway, its thick, almost 
rough, columns recalling Medinet-Abu. 
There is not very much to see, but from 
there one has a fine view of other temples 
— of the Ramesseum, looking superb, like 
a grand skeleton; of Medinet-Abu, dis- 
tant, very pale gold in the morning sun- 
light ; of little Deir-al-Medinet, the pretty 
child of the Ptolemies, with the heads of 
the seven Hathors. And from Kurna the 
Colossi are exceptionally grand and ex- 
ceptionally personal, so personal that one 
163 



164 THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS 



imagines one sees the expressions of the 
faces that they no longer possess. 

Even if you do not go into the tombs — 
but you will go — you must ride to the 
tombs of the kings ; and you must, if you 
care for the finesse of impressions, ride 
on a blazing day and toward the hour of 
noon. Then the ravine is itself, like the 
great act that demonstrates a tempera- 
ment. It is the narrow home of fire, 
hemmed in by brilliant colours, nearly all 
— perhaps quite all — of which could be 
found in a glowing furnace. Every shade 
of yellow is there — lemon yellow, sulphur 
yellow, the yellow of amber, the yellow of 
orange with its tendency toward red, the 
yellow of gold, sand colour, sun colour. 
Cannot all these yellows be found in a 
fire ? And there are the reds — pink of the 
carnation, pink of the coral, red of the 
little rose that grows in certain places 
of sands, red of the bright flame's heart. 
And all these colours are mingled in com- 
plete sterility. And* all are fused into a 



THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS 165 



fierce brotherhood by the sun. And like 
a flood, they seem flowing to the red and 
the yellow mountains, like a flood that is 
flowing to its sea. You are taken by them 
toward the mountains, on and on, till the 
world is closing in, and you know the way 
must come to an end. And it comes to 
an end — in a tomb. 

You go to a door in the rock, and a 
guardian lets you in, and wants to follow 
you in. Prevent him if you can. Pay 
him. Go in alone. For this is the tomb 
of Amenhotep II. ; and he himself is here, 
far down, at rest under the mountain, 
this king who lived and reigned more 
than fourteen hundred years before the 
birth of Christ. The ravine-valley leads to 
him, and you should go to him alone. He 
lies in the heart of the living rock, in 
the dull heat of the earth's bowels, which 
is like no other heat. You descend by 
stairs and corridors, you pass over a well 
by a bridge, you pass through a naked 
chamber ; and the king is not there. And 



166 THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS 



you go on down another staircase, and 
along another corridor, and you come into 
a pillared chamber, with paintings on its 
walls, and on its pillars, paintings of the 
king in the presence of the gods of the 
underworld, under stars in a soft blue sky. 
And below you, shut in on the farther 
side by the solid mountain in whose breast 
you have all this time been walking, there 
is a crypt. And you turn away from the 
bright paintings, and down there you see 
the king. 

Many years ago in London I went to 
the private view of the Royal Academy 
at Burlington House. I went in the after- 
noon, when the galleries w r ere crowded 
with politicians and artists, with dealers, 
gossips, quidnuncs, and flaneurs; with 
authors, fashionable lawyers, and doctors ; 
with men and women of the world; with 
young dandies and actresses en vogue. 
A roar of voices went up to the roof. 
Every one was talking, smiling, laughing, 
commenting, and criticising. It was a 



THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS 167 



little picture of the very worldly world 
that loves the things of to-day and the 
chime of the passing hours. And sud- 
denly some people near me were silent, 
and some turned their heads to stare with 
a strangely fixed attention. And I saw 
coming toward me an emaciated figure, 
rather bent, much drawn together, walk- 
ing slowly on legs like sticks. It was clad 
in black, with a gleam of colour. Above 
it was a face so intensely thin that it was 
like the face of death. And in this face 
shone two eyes that seemed full of — the 
other world. And, like a breath from the 
other world passing, this man went by me 
and was hidden from me by the throng. 
It was Cardinal Manning in the last days 
of his life. 

The face of this king is like his, but it 
has an even deeper pathos as it looks up- 
ward to the rock. And the king's silence 
bids you be silent, and his immobility bids 
you be still. And his sad, and unutterable 
resignation sifts awe, as by the desert 



168 THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS 



wind the sand is sifted into the temples, 
into the temple of your heart. And you 
feel the touch of time, but the touch of 
eternity, too. And as, in that rock-hewn 
sanctuary, you whisper " Pax vobiscum/' 
you say it for all the world. 



EDFU 



XIV 



EDFU 

Prayer pervades the East. Far off 
across the sands, when one is travelling 
in the desert, one sees thin minarets ris- 
ing toward the sky. A desert city is 
there. It signals its presence by this mute 
appeal to Allah. And where there are no 
minarets — in the great wastes of the 
dunes, in the eternal silence, the lifeless- 
ness that is not broken even by any lonely, 
wandering bird — the camels are stopped 
at the appointed hours, the poor, and often 
ragged, robes are laid down, the brown 
pilgrims prostrate themselves in prayer. 
And the rich man spreads his carpet, and 
prays. And the half-naked nomad 
spreads nothing; but he prays, too. The 
East is full of lust, and full of money- 
171 



172 



EDFU 



getting, and full of bartering, and full of 
violence ; but it is full of worship — of wor- 
ship that disdains concealment, that recks 
not of ridicule or comment, that believes 
too utterly to care if others disbelieve. 
There are in the East many men who do 
not pray. They do not laugh at the man 
who does, like the unpraying Christian. 
There is nothing ludicrous to them in 
prayer. In Egypt your Nubian sailor 
prays in the stern of your dahabiyeh; 
and your Egyptian boatman prays by the 
rudder of your boat ; and your black don- 
key-boy prays behind a red rock in the 
sand; and your camel-man prays when 
you are resting in the noontide, watch- 
ing the far-off quivering mirage, lost in 
some wayward dream. 

And must you not pray, too, when you 
enter certain temples where once strange 
gods were worshipped in whom no man 
now believes? 

There is one temple on the Nile which 
seems to embrace in its arms all the wor- 



EDFU 



173 



ship of the past; to be full of prayers and 
solemn praises ; to be the holder, the noble 
keeper, of the sacred longings, of the 
unearthly desires and aspirations, of the 
dead. It is the temple of Edfu. From all 
the other temples it stands apart. It is 
the temple of the inward flame, of the 
secret soul of man ; of that mystery with- 
in us that is exquisitely sensitive, and ex- 
quisitely alive; that has longings it can- 
not tell, and sorrows it dare not whisper, 
and loves it can only love. 

To Horus it was dedicated — hawk- 
headed Horus — the son of Isis and Osiris, 
who was crowned with many crowns, who 
was the young Apollo of the old Egyptian 
world. But though I know this, I am 
never able to associate Edfu with Horus, 
that child wearing the side-lock — when 
he is not hawk-headed in his solar aspect 
— that boy with his finger in his mouth, 
that youth who fought against Set, mur- 
derer of his father. 

Edfu, in its solemn beauty, in its per- 



174 



EDFU 



fection of form, seems to me to pass into 
a region altogether beyond identification 
with the worship of any special deity, with 
particular attributes, perhaps with partic- 
ular limitations; one who can be graven 
upon walls, and upon architraves and pil- 
lars painted in brilliant colours; one who 
can personally pursue a criminal, like 
some policeman in the street; even one 
who can rise upon the world in the visi- 
ble glory of the sun. To me, Edfu must 
always represent the world-worship of 
"the Hidden One"; not Amun, god of 
the dead, fused with Ra, with Amsu, or 
with Khnum : but that other " Hidden 
One," who is God of the happy hunting- 
ground of savages, with whom the Bud- 
dhist strives to merge his strange serenity 
of soul ; who is adored in the " Holy 
Places " by the Moslem, and lifted mysti- 
cally above the heads of kneeling Catho- 
lics in cathedrals dim with incense, and 
merrily praised with the banjo and the 
trumpet in the streets of black English 



EDFU 



175 



cities; who is asked for children by long- 
ing women, and for new dolls by lisping 
babes ; whom the atheist denies in the day, 
and fears in the darkness of night; who 
is on the lips alike of priest and blasphe- 
mer, and in the soul of all human life. 

Edfu stands alone, not near any other 
temple. It is not pagan; it is not 
Christian: it is a place in which to wor- 
ship according to the dictates of your 
heart. 

Edfu stands alone on the bank of the 
Nile between Luxor and Assuan. It is 
not very far from El-Kab, once the capi- 
tal of Upper Egypt, and it is about two 
thousand years old. The building of it 
took over one hundred and eighty years, 
and it is the most perfectly preserved tem- 
ple to-day of all the antique world. It is 
huge and it is splendid. It has towers 
one hundred and twelve feet high, a prop- 
ylon two hundred and fifty-two feet 
broad, and walls four hundred and fifty 
feet long. Begun in the reign of Ptolemy 



176 



EDFU 



III., it was completed only fifty-seven 
years before the birth of Christ. 

You know these facts about it, and you 
forget them, or at least you do not think 
of them. What does all that matter when 
you are alone in Edfu? Let the antiqua- 
rian go with his anxious nose almost 
touching the stone; let the Egyptologist 
peer through his glasses at hieroglyphs 
and puzzle out the meaning of cartouches : 
but let us wander at ease, and worship, 
and regard the exquisite form, and drink 
in the mystical spirit, of this very wonder- 
ful temple. 

Do you care about form? Here you 
will find it in absolute perfection. Edfu 
is the consecration of form. In propor- 
tion it is supreme above all other Egyp- 
tian temples. Its beauty of form is like 
a music. Its design affects one like the 
chiselled loveliness of a perfect sonnet. 
While the world lasts, no architect can 
arise to create a building more satisfying, 
more calm with the calm of faultlessness, 



EDFU 



177 



more serene with a just serenity. Or so 
it seems to me. I think of the most lovely 
buildings I know in Europe — of the Al- 
hambra at Granada, of the Cappella Pala- 
tina in the palace at Palermo. And Edfu 
I place with them — Edfu utterly different 
from them, more different, perhaps, even 
than they are from each other, but akin to 
them, as all great beauty is mysteriously 
akin. I have spent morning after morning 
in the Alhambra, and many and many an 
hour in the Cappella Palatina; and never 
have I been weary of either, or longed to 
go away. And this same sweet desire to 
stay came over me in Edfu. The Loulia 
was tied up by the high bank of the 
Nile. The sailors were glad to rest. 
There was no steamer sounding its hid- 
eous siren to call me to its crowded deck. 
So I yielded to my desire, and for long I 
stayed in Edfu. And when at last I left 
it I said to myself, " This is a supreme 
thing," and I knew that within me had 
suddenly developed the curious passion 



i 7 8 



EDFU 



for buildings that some people never feel, 
and that others feel ever growing and 
growing. 

Yes, Edfu is supreme. No alteration 
could improve it. Any change made in 
it, however slight, could only be harmful 
to it. Pure and perfect is its design — 
broad propylon, great open courtyard with 
pillared galleries, halls, chambers, sanc- 
tuary. Its dignity and its sobriety are 
matchless. I know they must be, because 
they touched me so strangely, with a kind 
of reticent enchantment, and I am not by 
nature enamoured of sobriety, of reticence 
and calm, but am inclined to delight in 
almost violent force, in brilliance, and, es- 
pecially, in combinations of colour. In the 
Alhambra one finds both force and fairy- 
like lightness, delicious proportions, deli- 
cate fantasy, a spell as of subtle magi- 
cians; in the Cappella Palatina, a jewelled 
splendour, combined with a small perfec- 
tion of form which simply captivates the 
whole spirit and leads it to adoration. In 



EDFU 



179 



Edfu you are face to face with hugeness 
and with grandeur; but soon you are 
scarcely aware of either — in the sense, at 
least, that connects these qualities with a 
certain overwhelming, almost striking 
down, of the spirit and the faculties. 
What you are aware of is your own im- 
mense and beautiful calm of utter satis- 
faction — a calm which has quietly inun- 
dated you, like a waveless tide of the sea. 
How rare it is to feel this absolute satis- 
faction, this praising serenity! The criti- 
cal spirit goes, like a bird from an opened 
window. The excited, laudatory, voluble 
spirit goes. And this splendid calm is 
left. If you stay here, you, as this tem- 
ple has been, will be moulded into a beau- 
tiful sobriety. From the top of the pylon 
you have received this still and glorious 
impression from the matchless design of 
the whole building, which you see best 
from there. When you descend the shal- 
low staircase, when you stand in the great 
court, when you go into the shadowy 



i8o 



EDFU 



halls, then it is that the utter satisfaction 
within you deepens. Then it is that you 
feel the need to worship in this place 
created for worship. 

The ancient Egyptians made most of 
their temples in conformity with a single 
type. The sanctuary was the heart, the 
core, of each temple — the sanctuary sur- 
rounded by the chambers in which were 
laid up the precious objects connected 
with ceremonies and sacrifices. Leading 
to this core of the temple, which was 
sometimes called " the divine house/' were 
various halls the roofs of which were sup- 
ported by columns — those hypostyle halls 
which one sees perpetually in Egypt. Be- 
fore the first of these halls was a court- 
yard surrounded by a colonnade. In the 
courtyard the priests of the temple as- 
sembled. The people were allowed to en- 
ter the colonnade. A gateway with tow- 
ers gave entrance to the courtyard. If 
one visits many of the Egyptian temples, 
one soon becomes aware of the subtlety, 



EDFU 



181 



combined with a sort of high simplicity 
and sense of mystery and poetry, of these 
builders of the past. As a great writer 
leads one on, with a concealed but beau- 
tiful art, from the first words of his story 
to the last — the last words to which all 
the other words are ministering servants ; 
as the great musician — Wagner in his 
" Meistersinger," for instance — leads one 
from the first notes of his score to those 
final notes which magnificently reveal to 
the listeners the real meaning of those 
first notes, and of all the notes which fol- 
low them: so the Egyptian builders lead 
the spirit gently, mysteriously forward 
from the gateway between the towers to 
the distant house divine. When one en- 
ters the outer court, one feels the far-off 
sanctuary. Almost unconsciously one is 
aware that for that sanctuary all the rest 
of the temple was created; that to that 
sanctuary everything tends. And in spirit 
one is drawn softly onward to that very 
holy place. Slowly, perhaps, the body 



EDFU 



moves from courtyard to hypostyle hall, 
and from one hall to another. Hiero- 
glyphs are examined, cartouches puzzled 
out, paintings of processions, or bas-re- 
liefs of pastimes and of sacrifices, looked 
at with care and interest; but all the time 
one has the sense of waiting, of a want 
unsatisfied. And only when one at last 
reaches the sanctuary is one perfectly at 
rest. For then the spirit feels : " This 
is the meaning of it all." 

One of the means which the Egyptian 
architects used to create this sense of ap- 
proach is very simple, but perfectly effec- 
tive. It consisted only in making each 
hall on a very slightly higher level than 
the one preceding it, and the sanctuary, 
which is narrow and mysteriously dark, 
on the highest level of all. Each time one 
takes an upward step, or walks up a little 
incline of stone, the body seems to con- 
vey to the soul a deeper message of rev- 
erence and awe. In no other temple is 
this sense of approach to the heart of a 



EDFU 



183 



thing so acute as it is when one walks in 
Edf u. In no other temple, when the sanc- 
tuary is reached, has one such a strong 
consciousness of being indeed within a 
sacred heart. 

The colour of Edfu is a pale and deli- 
cate brown, warm in the strong sunshine, 
but seldom glowing. Its first doorway is 
extraordinarily high, and is narrow, but 
very deep, with a roof showing traces of 
that delicious, clear blue-green which is 
like a thin cry of joy rising up in the sol- 
emn temples of Egypt. A small sphinx 
keeps watch on the right, just where the 
guardian stands; this guardian, the gift 
of the past, squat, even fat, with a very 
perfect face of a determined and hand- 
some man. In the court, upon a pedestal, 
stands a big bird, and near it is another 
bird, or rather half of a bird, leaning for- 
ward, and much defaced. And in this 
great courtyard there are swarms of liv- 
ing birds, twittering in the sunshine. 
Through the doorway between the towers 



EDFU 



one sees a glimpse of a native village with 
the cupolas of a mosque. 

I stood and looked at the cupolas for a 
moment. Then I turned, and forgot for 
a time the life of the world without— that 
men, perhaps, were praying beneath those 
cupolas, or praising the Moslem's God. 
For when I turned, I felt, as I have said, 
as if all the worship of the world must be 
concentrated here. Standing far down the 
open court, in the full sunshine, I could 
see into the first hypostyle hall, but be- 
yond only a darkness — a darkness which 
led me on, in which the further chambers 
of the house divine were hidden. As I 
went on slowly, the perfection of the plan 
of the dead architects was gradually re- 
vealed to me, when the darkness gave up 
its secrets; when I saw not clearly, but 
dimly, the long way between the columns, 
the noble columns themselves, the gradual, 
slight upward slope — graduated by gen- 
ius; there is no other word — which led 
to the sanctuary, seen at last as a little 



EDFU 



185 



darkness, in which all the mystery of wor- 
ship, and of the silent desires of men, was 
surely concentrated, and kept by the stone 
for ever. Even the succession of the dark- 
nesses, like shadows growing deeper and 
deeper, seemed planned by some great ar- 
tist in the management of light, and so 
of shadow effects. The perfection of 
form is in Edfu, impossible to describe, 
impossible not to feel. The tremendous 
effect it has — an effect upon the soul — is 
created by a combination of shapes, of 
proportions, of different levels, of differ- 
ent heights, by consummate graduation. 
And these shapes, proportions, different 
levels, and heights, are seen in dimness. 
Not that jewelled dimness one loves in 
Gothic cathedrals, but the heavy dimness 
of windowless, mighty chambers lighted 
only by a rebuked daylight ever trying 
to steal in. One is captured by no orna- 
ment, seduced by no lovely colours. Better 
than any ornament, greater than any ra- 
diant glory of colour, is this massive aus- 



i86 



EDFU 



terity. It is like the ultimate in an art. 
Everything has been tried, every strange- 
ness bizarrerie, absurdity, every wild 
scheme of hues, every preposterous sub- 
ject — to take an extreme instance, a 
camel, wearing a top-hat, and lighted up 
by fire-works, which I saw recently in a 
picture-gallery of Munich. And at the 
end a genius paints a portrait of a 
wrinkled old woman's face, and the world 
regards and worships. Or all discords 
have been flung together pell-mell, resolu- 
tion of them has been deferred perpet- 
ually, perhaps even denied altogether, 
chord of B major has been struck with 
C major, works have closed upon the 
leading note or the dominant seventh, 
symphonies have been composed to be 
played in the dark, or to be accompanied 
by a magic-lantern's efforts, operas been 
produced which are merely carnage and 
a row — and at the end a genius writes a 
little song, and the world gives the tribute 
of its breathless silence and its tears. 



EDFU 



187 



And it knows that though other things 
may be done, better things can never be 
done. For no perfection can exceed any 
other perfection. 

And so in Edfu I feel that this untinted 
austerity is perfect; that whatever may 
be done in architecture during future ages 
of the world, Edfu, while it lasts, will 
remain a thing supreme — supreme in 
form and, because of this supremacy, su- 
preme in the spell which it casts upon the 
soul. 

The sanctuary is just a small, beauti- 
fully proportioned, inmost chamber, with 
a black roof, containing a sort of altar 
of granite, and a great polished granite 
shrine which no doubt once contained the 
god Horus. I am glad he is not there 
now. How far more impressive it is to 
stand in an empty sanctuary in the house 
divine of " the Hidden One," whom the 
nations of the earth worship, whether they 
spread their robes on the sand and turn 
their faces to Mecca, or beat the tarn- 



i88 



EDFU 



bourine and sing " glory hymns " of sal- 
vation, or flagellate themselves in the 
night before the patron saint of the Pas- 
sionists, or only gaze at the snow-white 
plume that floats from the snows of Etna 
under the rose of dawn, and feel the soul 
behind Nature. Among the temples of 
Egypt, Edfu is the house divine of " the 
Hidden One," the perfect temple of wor- 
ship. 



KOM OMBOS 



XV 



KOM OMBOS 

Some; people talk of the " sameness " of 
the Nile; and there is a lovely sameness 
of golden light, of delicious air, of peo- 
ple, and of scenery. For Egypt is, after 
all, mainly a great river with strips on 
each side of cultivated land, flat, green, 
not very varied. River, green plains, yel- 
low plains, pink, brown, steel-grey, or 
pale-yellow mountains, wail of shadoof, 
wail of sakieh. Yes, I suppose there is 
a sameness, a sort of golden monotony, 
in this land pervaded with light and per- 
vaded with sound. Always there is light 
around you, and you are bathing in it, 
and nearly always, if you are living, as I 
was, on the water, there is a multitude of 
mingling sounds floating, floating to your 
191 



192 



KOM OMBOS 



ears. As there are two lines of green 
land, two lines of mountains, following the 
course of the Nile; so are there two lines 
of voices that cease their calling and their 
singing only as you draw near to Nubia. 
For then, with the green land, they fade 
away, these miles upon miles of calling 
and singing brown men; and amber and 
ruddy sands creep downward to the Nile. 
And the air seems subtly changing, and 
the light perhaps growing a little harder. 
And you are aware of other regions un- 
like those you are leaving, more African, 
more savage, less suave, less like a dream- 
ing. And especially the silence makes a 
great impression on you. But before you 
enter this silence, between the amber and 
ruddy walls that will lead you on to Nu- 
bia, and to the land of the crocodile, you 
have a visit to pay. For here, high up 
on a terrace, looking over a great bend 
of the river, is Kom Ombos. And Kom 
Ombos is the temple of the crocodile god. 
Sebek was one of the oldest and one of 



KOM OMBOS 



193 



the most evil of the Egyptian gods. In 
the Fayum he was worshipped, as well as 
at Kom Ombos, and there, in the holy lake 
of his temple, were numbers of holy croco- 
diles, which Strabo tells us were decor- 
ated with jewels like pretty women. He 
did not get on with the other gods, and 
was sometimes confused with Set, who 
personified natural darkness, and who also 
was worshipped by the people about Kom 
Ombos. 

I have spoken of the golden sameness 
of the Nile, but this sameness is broken 
by the variety of the temples. Here you 
have a striking instance of this variety. 
Edfu, only forty miles from Kom Ombos, 
the next temple which you visit, is the 
most perfect temple in Egypt. Kom Om- 
bos is one of the most imperfect. Edfu 
is a divine house of " the Hidden One," 
full of a sacred atmosphere. Kom Om- 
bos is the house of crocodiles. In ancient 
days the inhabitants of Edfu abhorred, 
above everything, crocodiles and their 



194 



KOM OMBOS 



worshippers. And here at Kom Ombos 
the crocodile was adored. You are in a 
different atmosphere. 

As soon as you land, you are greeted 
with crocodiles, though fortunately not by 
them. A heap of their black mummies is 
shown to you reposing in a sort of tomb 
or shrine open at one end to the air. By 
these mummies the new note is loudly 
struck. The crocodiles have carried you 
in an instant from that which is pervad- 
ingly general to that which is narrowly 
particular; from the purely noble, which 
seems to belong to all time, to the en- 
tirely barbaric, which belongs only to 
times outworn. It is difficult to feel as if 
one had anything in common with men 
who seriously worshipped crocodiles, had 
priests to feed them, and decorated their 
scaly necks with jewels. 

Yet the crocodile god had a noble tem- 
ple at Kom Ombos, a temple which dates 
from the times of the Ptolemies, though 
there was a temple in earlier days which 



KOM OMBOS 195 



has now disappeared. Its situation is 
splendid. It stands high above the Nile, 
and close to the river, on a terrace which 
has recently been constructed to save it 
from the encroachments of the water. 
And it looks down upon a view which is 
exquisite in the clear light of early morn- 
ing. On the right, and far off, is a deli- 
cious pink bareness of distant flats and 
hills. Opposite there is a flood of verdure 
and of trees going to mountains, a spit of 
sand where is an inlet of the river, with a 
crowd of native boats, perhaps waiting for 
a wind. On the left is the big bend of 
the Nile, singularly beautiful, almost vol- 
uptuous in form, and girdled with a ra- 
diant green of crops, with palm-trees, and 
again the distant hills. Sebek was well 
advised to have his temples here and in 
the glorious Fayum, that land flowing 
with milk and honey, where the air is full 
of the voices of the flocks and herds, and 
alive with the wild pigeons; where the 
sweet sugar-cane towers up in fairy for- 



ig6 KOM OMBOS 



ests, the beloved home of the jackal; 
where the green corn waves to the hori- 
zon, and the runlets of water make a 
maze of silver threads carrying life and 
its happy murmur through all the vast 
oasis. 

At the guardian's gate by which you 
go in there sits, not a watch dog, nor yet 
a crocodile, but a watch cat, small, but 
very determined, and very attentive to its 
duties, and neatly carved in stone. You 
try to look like a crocodile-worshipper. 
It is deceived, and lets you pass. And you 
are alone with the growing morning and 
Kom Ombos. 

I was never taken, caught up into an 
atmosphere, in Kom Ombos. I examined 
it with interest, but I did not feel a spell. 
Its grandeur is great, but it did not af- 
fect me as did the grandeur of Karnak. 
Its nobility cannot be questioned, but I 
did not stilly rejoice in it, as in the no- 
bility of Luxor, or the free splendour of 
the Ramesseum. 



KOM OMBOS 197 



The oldest thing at Kom Ombos is a 
gateway of sandstone placed there by 
Thothmes III. as a tribute to Sebek. The 
great temple is of a warm-brown colour, 
a very rich and particularly beautiful 
brown, that soothes and almost comforts 
the eyes that have been for many days 
boldly assaulted by the sun. Upon the 
terrace platform above the river you face 
a low and ruined wall, on which there are 
some lively reliefs, beyond which is a 
large, open court containing a quantity 
of stunted, once big columns standing on 
big bases. Immediately before you the 
temple towers up, very gigantic, very ma- 
jestic, with a stone pavement, walls on 
which still remain some traces of paint- 
ings, and really grand columns, enor- 
mous in size and in good formation. 
There are fine architraves, and some bits 
of roofing, but the greater part is open 
to the air. Through a doorway is a sec- 
ond hall containing columns much less 
noble, and beyond this one walks in ruin, 



198 KOM OMBOS 



among crumbled or partly destroyed 
chambers, broken statues, become mere 
slabs of granite and fallen blocks of stone. 
At the end is a wall, with a pavement bor- 
dering it, and a row of chambers that look 
like monkish cells, closed by small doors. 
At Kom Ombos there are two sanctuaries, 
one dedicated to Sebek, the other to Heru- 
ur, or Haroeris, a form of Horus in 
Egyptian called " the Elder," which was 
worshipped with Sebek here by the ad- 
mirers of crocodiles. Each of them con- 
tains a pedestal of granite upon which 
once rested a sacred bark bearing an im- 
age of the deity. 

There are some fine reliefs scattered 
through these mighty ruins, showing Se- 
bek with the head of a crocodile, Heru-ur 
with the head of a hawk so characteristic 
of Horus, and one strange animal which 
has no fewer than four heads, apparently 
meant for the heads of lions. One relief 
which I specially noticed for its life, its 
charming vivacity, and its almost amus- 



KOM OMBOS 199 



ing fidelity to details unchanged to-day, 
depicts a number of ducks in full flight 
near a mass of lotus-flowers. I remem- 
bered it one day in the Fayum, so inti- 
mately associated with Sebek, when I rode 
twenty miles out from camp on a drome- 
dary to the end of the great lake of Ku- 
run, where the sand wastes of the Libyan 
desert stretch to the pale and waveless 
waters which, that day, looked curiously 
desolate and even sinister under a low, 
grey sky. Beyond the wiry tamarisk- 
bushes, which grow far out from the 
shore, thousands upon thousands of wild 
duck were floating as far as the eyes could 
see. We took a strange native boat, 
manned by two half -naked fishermen, and 
were rowed with big, broad-bladed oars 
out upon the silent flood that the silent 
desert surrounded. But the duck were 
too wary ever to let us get within range 
of them. As we drew gently near, they 
rose in black throngs, and skimmed low 
into the distance of the wintry landscape, 



200 KOM OMBOS 



trailing their legs behind them, like the 
duck on the wall of Kom Ombos. There 
was no duck for dinner in camp that 
night, and the cook was inconsolable. But 
I had seen a relief come to life, and sur- 
mounted my disappointment. 

Kom Ombos and Edfu, the two houses 
of the lovers and haters of crocodiles, or 
at least of the lovers and the haters of 
their worship, I shall always think of 
them together, because I drifted on the 
Loulia from one to the other, and saw no 
interesting temple between them, and be- 
cause their personalities are as opposed 
as were, centuries ago, the tenets of those 
who adored within them. The Egyptians 
of old were devoted to the hunting of 
crocodiles, which once abounded in the 
reaches of the Nile between Assuan and 
Luxor, and also much lower down. But 
I believe that no reliefs, or paintings, of 
this sport are to be found upon the walls 
of the temples and the tombs. The fear 
of Sebek, perhaps, prevailed even over the 



KOM OMBOS 201 



dwellers about the temple of Edfu. Yet 
how could fear of any crocodile god in- 
fect the souls of those who were privi- 
leged to worship in such a temple, or even 
reverently to stand under the colonnade 
within the court? As well, perhaps, one 
might ask how men could be inspired to 
raise such a perfect building to a deity 
with the face of a hawk? But Horus was 
not the god of crocodiles, but a god of the 
sun. And his power to inspire men must 
have been vast; for the greatest concep- 
tion in stone in Egypt, and, I suppose, in 
the whole world, the Sphinx, as De Rouge 
proved by an inscription at Edfu, was a 
representation of Horus transformed to 
conquer Typhon. The Sphinx and Edfu ! 
For such marvels we ought to bless the 
hawk-headed god. And if we forget the 
hawk, which one meets so perpetually 
upon the walls of tombs and temples, and 
identify Horus rather with the Greek 
Apollo, the yellow-haired god of the sun, 
driving " westerly all day in his flaming 



202 KOM OMBOS 



chariot/' and shooting his golden arrows 
at the happy world beneath, we can be at 
peace with those dead Egyptians. For 
every pilgrim who goes to Edfu to-day is 
surely a worshipper of the solar aspect of 
Horus. As long as the world lasts there 
will be sun-worshippers. Every brown 
man upon the Nile is one, and every good 
American who crosses the ocean and 
comes at last into the sombre wonder of 
Edfu, and I was one upon the deck of the 
Loulia. 

And we all worship as yet in the dark, 
as in the exquisite dark, like faith, of the 
Holy of Holies of Horus. 



PHILvE 



XVI 



PHIL^E 

As I drew slowly nearer and nearer to 
the home of " the great Enchantress/' or, 
as Isis was also called in bygone days, 
" the Lady of Philae," the land began to 
change in character, to be full of a new 
and barbaric meaning. In recent years 
I have paid many visits to northern Af- 
rica, but only to Tunisia and Algeria, 
countries that are wilder looking, and 
much wilder seeming than Egypt. Now, 
as I approached Assuan, I seemed at last 
to be also approaching the real, the in- 
tense Africa that I had known in the Sa- 
hara, the enigmatic siren, savage and 
strange and wonderful, whom the typical 
Ouled Nail, crowned with gold, and tufted 

with ostrich plumes, painted with kohl, 
205 



2o6 



PHIUE 



tattooed, and perfumed, hung with golden 
coins and amulets, and framed in plaits 
of coarse, false hair, represents indiffer- 
ently to the eyes of the travelling 
stranger. For at last I saw the sands that 
I love creeping down to the banks of the 
Nile. And they brought with them that 
wonderful air which belongs only to them 
— the air that dwells among the dunes in 
the solitary places, that is like the cool 
touch of Liberty upon the face of a man, 
that makes the brown child of the nomad 
as lithe, tireless, and fierce-spirited as a 
young panther, and sets flame in the eyes 
of the Arab horse, and gives speed of the 
wind to the Sloughi. The true lover of 
the desert can never rid his soul of its 
passion for the sands, and now my heart 
leaped as I stole into their pure embraces, 
as I saw to right and left amber curves 
and sheeny recesses, shining ridges and 
bloomy clefts. The clean delicacy of those 
sands that, in long and glowing hills, 
stretched out from Nubia to meet me, who 



PHIL^E 



207 



could ever describe them? Who could 
ever describe their soft and enticing 
shapes, their exquisite gradations of col- 
our, the little shadows in their hollows, 
the fiery beauty of their crests, the pat- 
terns the cool winds make upon them? It 
is an enchanted royaume of the sands 
through which one approaches Isis. 

Isis and engineers! We English peo- 
ple have effected that curious introduction, 
and we greatly pride ourselves upon it. 
We have presented Sir William Garstin, 
and Mr. John Blue, and Mr. FitzMaurice, 
and other clever, hard-working men to 
the fabled Lady of Philae, and they have 
given her a gift: a dam two thousand 
yards in length, upon which tourists go 
smiling on trolleys. Isis has her expen- 
sive tribute — it cost about a million and 
a half pounds — and no doubt she ought 
to be gratified. 

Yet I think Isis mourns on altered 
Philae, as she mourns with her sister, 
Nepthys, at the heads of so many mum- 



208 



mies of Osirians upon the walls of Egyp- 
tian tombs. And though the fellaheen 
very rightly rejoice, there are some un- 
practical sentimentalists who form a com- 
pany about her, and make their plaint 
with hers — their plaint for the peace that 
is gone, for the lost calm, the departed 
poetry, that once hung, like a delicious, 
like an inimitable, atmosphere, about the 
palms of the " Holy Island/' 

I confess that I dreaded to revisit 
Philae. I had sweet memories of the island 
that had been with me for many years — 
memories of still mornings under the 
palm-trees, watching the gliding waters 
of the river, or gazing across them to the 
long sweep of the empty sands ; memories 
of drowsy, golden noons, when the bright 
world seemed softly sleeping, and the al- 
most daffodil-coloured temple dreamed 
under the quivering canopy of blue ; mem- 
ories of evenings when a benediction from 
the lifted hands of Romance surely fell 
upon the temple and the island and the 



209 



river; memories of moonlit nights, when 
the spirits of the old gods to whom the 
temples were reared surely held converse 
with the spirits of the desert, with Mirage 
and her pale and evading sisters of the 
great spaces, under the brilliant stars. I 
was afraid, because I could not believe 
the asservations of certain practical per- 
sons, full of the hard and almost angry 
desire of " Progress/' that no harm had 
been done by the creation of the reservoir, 
but that, on the contrary, it had benefited 
the temple. The action of the water upon 
the stone, they said with vehement voices, 
instead of loosening it and causing it to 
crumble untimely away, had tended to har- 
den and consolidate it. Here I should 
like to lie, but I resist the temptation. 
Monsieur Naville has stated that possibly 
the English engineers have helped to pro- 
long the lives of the buildings of Philae, 
and Monsieur Maspero has declared that 
" the state of the temple of Philae becomes 
continually more satisfactory. ,, So be 



2IO 



PHIL^E 



it! Longevity has been, by a happy 
chance, secured. But what of beauty? 
What of the beauty of the past, and what 
of the schemes for the future? Is Philae 
even to be left as it is, or are the waters 
of the Nile to be artificially raised still 
higher, until Philae ceases to be? Soon, 
no doubt, an answer will be given. 

Meanwhile, instead of the little island 
that I knew, and thought a little paradise 
breathing out enchantment in the midst 
of titanic sterility, I found a something 
diseased. Philae now, when out of the 
water, as it was all the time when I was 
last in Egypt, looks like a thing stricken 
with some creeping malady — one of those 
maladies which begin in the lower mem- 
bers of a body, and work their way gradu- 
ally but inexorably upward to the trunk, 
until they attain the heart. 

I came to it by the desert, and de- 
scended to Shellal — Shellal with its rail- 
way-station, its workmen's buildings, its 
tents, its dozens of screens to protect the 



211 



hewers of stone from the burning rays of 
the sun, its bustle of people, of overseers, 
engineers, and workmen, Egyptian, Nu- 
bian, Italian, and Greek. The silence I 
had known was gone, though the desert 
lay all around — the great sands, the great 
masses of granite that look as if patiently 
waiting to be fashioned into obelisks, and 
sarcophagi, and statues. But away there 
across the bend of the river, dominating 
the ugly rummage of this intrusive bee- 
hive of human bees, sheer grace overcom- 
ing strength both of nature and human 
nature, rose the fabled " Pharaoh's Bed " ; 
gracious, tender, from Shellal most deli- 
cately perfect, and glowing with pale gold 
against the grim background of the hills 
on the western shore. It seemed to plead 
for mercy, like something feminine 
threatened with outrage, to protest 
through its mere beauty, as a woman 
might protest by an attitude, against fur- 
ther desecration. 

And in the distance the Nile roared 



212 



phil^: 



through the many gates of the dam, mak- 
ing answer to the protest. 

What irony was in this scene! In the 
old days of Egypt Philae was sacred 
ground, was the Nile-protected home of 
sacerdotal mysteries, was a veritable 
Mecca to the believers in Osiris, to which 
it was forbidden even to draw near with- 
out permission. The ancient Egyptians 
swore solemnly " By him who sleeps in 
Philae/' Now they sometimes sware an- 
grily at him who wakes in, or at least by, 
Philae, and keeps them steadily going at 
their appointed tasks. And instead of it 
being forbidden to draw near to a sacred 
spot, needy men from foreign countries 
flock thither in eager crowds, not to wor- 
ship in beauty, but to earn a living wage. 

And " Pharaoh's Bed 99 looks out over 
the water and seems to wonder what will 
be the end. 

I was glad to escape from Shellal, pur- 
sued by the shriek of an engine announc- 
ing its departure from the station, glad 



PHIL^E 213 

to be on the quiet water, to put it between 
me and that crowd of busy workers. Be- 
fore me I saw a vast lake, not unlovely, 
where once the Nile flowed swiftly, far 
off a grey smudge — the very damnable 
dam. All around me was a grim and cruel 
world of rocks, and of hills that look al- 
most like heaps of rubbish, some of them 
grey, some of them in colour so dark that 
they resemble the lava torrents petrified 
near Catania, or the " Black Country " in 
England through which one rushes on 
one's way to the north. Just here and 
there, sweetly almost as the pink blossoms 
of the wild oleander, which I have seen 
from Sicilian seas lifting their heads from 
the crevices of sea rocks, the amber and 
rosy sands of Nubia smiled down over 
grit, stone, and granite. 

The setting of Philae is severe. Even 
in bright sunshine it has an iron look. On 
a grey or stormy day it would be forbid- 
ding or even terrible. In the old winters 
and springs one loved Philae the more be- 



214 



PHIUE 



cause of the contrast of its setting with 
its own lyrical beauty, its curious tender- 
ness of charm — a charm in which the isle 
itself was mingled with its buildings. 
But now, and before my boat had touched 
the quay, I saw that the island must be 
ignored — if possible. 

The water with which it is entirely cov- 
ered during a great part of the year seems 
to have cast a blight upon it. The very 
few palms have a drooping and tragic air. 
The ground has a gangrened appearance, 
and much of it shows a crawling mass 
of unwholesome-looking plants, which 
seem crouching down as if ashamed of 
their brutal exposure by the receded river, 
and of harsh and yellow-green grass, un- 
attractive to the eyes. As I stepped on 
shore I felt as if I were stepping on dis- 
ease. But at least there were the build- 
ings undisturbed by any outrage. Again 
I turned toward " Pharaoh's Bed," toward 
the temple standing apart from it, which 
already I had seen from the desert, near 



PHIL^B 



215 



Shellal, gleaming with its gracious sand- 
yellow, lifting its series of straight lines 
of masonry above the river and the rocks, 
looking, from a distance, very simple, with 
a simplicity like that of clear water, but 
as enticing as the light on the first real 
day of spring. 

I went first to " Pharaoh's Bed." 

Imagine a woman with a perfectly 
lovely face, with features as exquisitely 
proportioned as those, say, of Praxiteles's 
statue of the Cnidian Aphrodite, for 
which King Nicomedes was willing to re- 
mit the entire national debt of Cnidus, 
and with a warmly white rose-leaf com- 
plexion — one of those complexions one 
sometimes sees in Italian women, colour- 
less, yet suggestive almost of glow, of 
purity, with the flame of passion behind 
it. Imagine that woman attacked by a 
malady which leaves her features ex- 
actly as they were, but which changes the 
colour of her face — from the throat up- 
ward to just beneath the nose — from the 



2l6 



PHIUE 



warm white to a mottled, greyish hue. 
Imagine the line that would seem to be 
traced between the two complexions — 
the mottled grey below the warm white 
still glowing above. Imagine this, and 
you have " Pharaoh's Bed " and the tem- 
ple of Philae as they are to-day. 



" PHARAOH'S BED 



XVII 



" PHARAOH'S BED " 

" Pharaoh's Bed/' which stands alone 
close to the Nile on the eastern side of 
the island, is not one of those rugged, ma- 
jestic buildings, full of grandeur and 
splendour, which can bear, can " carry 
off," as it were, a cruelly imposed ugli- 
ness without being affected as a whole. 
It is, on the contrary, a small, almost an 
airy, and a femininely perfect thing, in 
which a singular loveliness of form was 
combined with a singular loveliness of 
colour. The spell it threw over you was 
not so much a spell woven of details as a 
spell woven of divine uniformity. To put 
it in very practical language, " Pharaoh's 
Bed " was " all of a piece." The form 
was married to the colour. The colour 
219 



220 "PHARAOH'S BED" 

seemed to melt into the form. It was in- 
deed a bed in which the soul that worships 
beauty could rest happily entranced. 
Nothing jarred. Antiquaries say that ap- 
parently this building was left unfinished. 
That may be so. But for all that it was 
one of the most finished things in Egypt, 
essentially a thing to inspire within one 
the ''perfect calm that is Greek/' The 
blighting touch of the Nile, which has 
changed the beautiful pale yellow of the 
stone of the lower part of the building to 
a hideous and dreary grey — which made 
me think of a steel knife on which liquid 
has been spilt and allowed to run — has 
destroyed the uniformity, the balance, the 
faultless melody lifted up by form and 
colour. And so it is with the temple. It 
is, as it were, cut in two by the intrusion 
into it of this hideous, mottled complex- 
ion left by the receded water. Every- 
where one sees disease on walls and col- 
umns, almost blotting out bas-reliefs, giv- 
ing to their active figures a morbid, a 



"PHARAOH'S BED" 



sickly look. The effect is specially dis- 
tressing in the open court that precedes 
the temple dedicated to the Lady of Philae. 
In this court, which is at the southern end 
of the island, the Nile at certain seasons 
is now forced to rise very nearly as high 
as the capitals of many of the columns. 
The consequence of this is that here the 
disease seems making rapid strides. One 
feels it is drawing near to the heart, and 
that the poor, doomed invalid may collapse 
at any moment. 

Yes, there is much to make one sad 
at Philae. But how much of pure beauty 
there is left — of beauty that merely pro- 
tests against any further outrage ! 

As there is something epic in the gran- 
deur of the Lotus Hall at Karnak, so 
there is something lyrical in the soft 
charm of the Philae temple. Certain 
things or places, certain things in certain 
places, always suggest to my mind certain 
people in whose genius I take delight — 
who have won me, and moved me by their 



222 "PHARAOH'S BED 



art. Whenever I go to Philae, the name 
of Shelley comes to me. I scarcely could 
tell why. I have no special reason to con- 
nect Shelley with Philae. But when I see 
that almost airy loveliness of stone, so 
simply elegant, so, somehow, spring-like 
in its pale-coloured beauty, its happy, daf- 
fodil charm, with its touch of the Greek 
— the sensitive hand from Attica stretched 
out over Nubia — I always think of Shel- 
ley. I think of Shelley the youth who 
dived down into the pool so deep that it 
seemed he was lost for ever to the sun. 
I think of Shelley the poet, full of a lyric 
ecstasy, who was himself like an embodied 

" Longing for something afar 
From the sphere of our sorrow." 

Lyrical Philae is like a temple of dreams, 
and of all poets Shelley might have 
dreamed the dream, and have told it to 
the world in a song. 

For all its solidity, there are a strange 
lightness and grace in the temple of 



" PHARAOH'S BED' 



Philse; there is an elegance you will not 
find in the other temples of Egypt. But 
it is an elegance quite undefiled by weak- 
ness, by any sentimentality. (Even a 
building, like a love-lorn maid, can be sen- 
timental.) Edward FitzGerald once de- 
fined taste as the feminine of genius. 
Taste prevails in Philse, a certain delicious 
femininity that seduces the eyes and the 
heart of man. Shall we call it the spirit 
of Isis? 

I have heard a clever critic and anti- 
quarian declare that he is not very fond 
of Philse; that he feels a certain " spu- 
riousness " in the temple due to the ming- 
ling of Greek with Egyptian influences. 
He may be right. I am no antiquarian, 
and, as a mere lover of beauty, I do not 
feel this " spuriousness." I can see 
neither two quarrelling strengths nor any 
weakness caused by division. I suppose I 
see only the beauty, as I might see only 
the beauty of a woman bred of a hand- 
some father and mother of different races, 



224 "PHARAOH'S BED" 

and who, not typical of either, combined 
in her features and figure distinguishing 
merits of both. It is true that there is a 
particular pleasure which is roused in us 
only by the absolutely typical — the com- 
pletely thoroughbred person or thing. It 
may be a pleasure not caused by beauty, 
and it may be very keen, nevertheless. 
When it is combined with the joy roused 
in us by all beauty, it is a very pure emo- 
tion of exceptional delight. Philae does 
not, perhaps, give this emotion. But it 
certainly has a lovableness that attaches 
the heart in a quite singular degree. The 
Philae-lover is the most faithful of lovers. 
The hold of his mistress upon him, once 
it has been felt, is never relaxed. And 
in his affection for Philae there is, I think, 
nearly always a rainbow strain of ro- 
mance. 

When we love anything, we love to be 
able to say of the object of our devotion, 
" There is nothing like it." Now, in all 
Egypt, and I suppose in all the world, 



"PHARAOH'S BED" 



there is nothing just like Philae. There 
are temples, yes; but where else is there 
a bouquet of gracious buildings such as 
these gathered in such a holder as this 
tiny, raft-like isle? And where else are 
just such delicate and, as I have said, light 
and almost feminine elegance and charm 
set in the midst of such severe sterility? 
Once, beyond Philae, the Great Cataract 
roared down from the wastes of Nubia 
into the green fertility of Upper Egypt. 
It roars no longer. But still the masses 
of the rocks, and still the amber and the 
yellow sands, and still the iron-coloured 
hills, keep guard round Philae. And still, 
despite the vulgar desecration that has 
turned Shellal into a workmen's suburb 
and dowered it with a railway-station, 
there is mystery in Philae, and the sense 
of isolation that only an island gives. 
Even now one can forget in Philae — for- 
get, after a while, and in certain parts 
of its buildings, the presence of the grey 
disease; forget the threatening of the al- 



226 "PHARAOH'S BED 



truists, who desire to benefit humanity by 
clearing as much beauty out of humanity's 
abiding-place as possible; forget the fact 
of the railway, except when the shriek 
of the engine floats over the water to one's 
ears; forget economic problems, and the 
destruction that their solving brings upon 
the silent world of things whose " use/ 1 
denied, unrecognised, or laughed at, to 
man is in their holy beauty, whose mis- 
sion lies not upon the broad highways 
where tramps the hungry body, but upon 
the secret, shadowy byways where glides 
the hungry soul. 

Yes, one can forget even now in the hall 
of the temple of Isis, where the capri- 
cious graces of form are linked with the 
capricious graces of colour, where, like 
old and delicious music in the golden 
strings of a harp, dwells a something — 
what is it? A murmur, or a perfume, or 
a breathing? — of old and vanished years 
when forsaken gods were worshipped. 
And one can forget in the chapel of Ha- 



"PHARAOH'S BED" 227 



thor, on whose wall little Horus is born, 
and in the grey hounds' chapel beside it. 
One can forget, for one walks in beauty. 

Lovely are the doorways in Philae, en- 
ticing are the shallow steps that lead one 
onward and upward; gracious the yellow 
towers that seem to smile a quiet welcome. 
And there is one chamber that is simply 
a place of magic — the hall of the painted 
portico, the delicious hall of the flowers. 

It is this chamber which always makes 
me think of Philse as a lovely temple of 
dreams, this silent, retired chamber, 
where some fabled princess might well 
have been touched to a long, long sleep 
of enchantment, and lain for years upon 
years among the magical flowers — the lo- 
tus, and the palm, and the papyrus. 

In my youth it made upon me an in- 
delible impression. Through intervening 
years, filled with many new impressions, 
many wanderings, many visions of beauty 
in other lands, that retired, painted cham- 
ber had not faded from my mind — or shall 



228 "PHARAOH'S BED 



I say from my heart ? There had seemed 
to me within it something that was in- 
effable, as in a lyric of Shelley's there is 
something that is ineffable, or in certain 
pictures of Boecklin, such as " The Villa 
by the Sea." And when at last, almost 
afraid and hesitating, I came into it once 
more, I found in it again the strange spell 
of old enchantment. 

It seems as if this chamber had been 
imagined by a poet, who had set it in the 
centre of the temple of his dream. It is 
such a spontaneous chamber that one can 
scarcely imagine it more than a day and 
a night in the building. Yet in detail it is 
lovely; it is finished and strangely mighty; 
it is a lyric in stone, the most poetical 
chamber, perhaps, in the whole of Egypt. 
For Philae I count in Egypt, though really 
it is in Nubia. 

One who has not seen Philae may per- 
haps wonder how a tall chamber of solid 
stone, containing heavy and soaring col- 
umns, can be like a lyric of Shelley's, can 



"PHARAOH'S BED 



be exquisitely spontaneous, and yet hold 
a something of mystery that makes one 
tread softly in it, and fear to disturb 
within it some lovely sleeper of Nubia, 
some Princess of the Nile. He must con- 
tinue to wonder. To describe this cham- 
ber calmly, as I might, for instance, de- 
scribe the temple of Derr, would be simply 
to destroy it. For things ineffable can- 
not be fully explained, or not be fully felt 
by those the twilight of whose dreams is 
fitted to mingle with their twilight. They 
who are meant to love with ardour se pas- 
sionnent pour la passion. And they who 
are meant to take and to keep the spirit 
of a dream, whether it be hidden in a 
poem, or held in the cup of a flower, or 
enfolded in arms of stone, will surely 
never miss it, even though they can hear 
roaring loudly above its elfin voice the .cry 
of directed waters rushing down to Upper 
Egypt. 

How can one disentangle from their 
tapestry web the different threads of a 



230 " PHARAOH'S BED 



spell? And even if one could, if one 
could hold them up, and explain, " The 
cause of the spell is that this comes in con- 
tact with this, and that this, which I show 
you, blends with, fades into, this," how 
could it advantage any one? Nothing 
would be made clearer, nothing be really 
explained. The ineffable is, and must ever 
remain, something remote and mysterious. 

And so one may say many things of 
this painted chamber of Philae, and yet 
never convey, perhaps never really know, 
the innermost cause of its charm. In it 
there is obvious beauty of form, and a 
seizing beauty of colour, beauty of sun- 
light and shadow, of antique association. 
This turquoise blue is enchanting, and 
Isis was worshipped here. What has the 
one to do with the other? Nothing; and 
yet how much ! For is not each of these 
facts a thread in the tapestry web of the 
spell? The eyes see the rapture of this 
very perfect blue. The imagination hears, 
as if very far off, the solemn chanting of 



" PHARAOH'S BED' 



priests, and smells the smoke of strange 
perfumes, and sees the long, aquiline nose 
and the thin, haughty lips of the goddess. 
And the colour becomes strange to the 
eyes, as well as very lovely, because, per- 
haps, it was there — it almost certainly 
was there — when from Constantinople 
went forth the decree that all Egypt 
should be Christian; when the priests of 
the sacred brotherhood of Isis were driven 
from their temple. 

Isis nursing Horus gave way to the 
Virgin and the Child. But the cycles spin 
away down " the ringing grooves of 
change." From Egypt has passed away 
that decreed Christianity. Now from the 
minaret the muezzin cries, and in palm- 
shaded villages I hear the loud hymns 
of earnest pilgrims starting on the jour- 
ney to Mecca. And ever this painted 
chamber shelters its mystery of poetry, 
its mystery of charm. And still its mar- 
vellous colours are fresh as in the far-off 
pagan days, and the opening lotus-flow- 



232 "PHARAOH'S BED" 

ers, and the closed lotus-buds, and the 
palm and the papyrus, are on the per- 
fect columns. And their intrinsic loveli- 
ness, and their freshness, and their age, 
and the mysteries they have looked on — 
all these facts are part of the spell that 
governs us to-day. In Edfu one is en- 
closed in a wonderful austerity. And one 
can only worship. In Philae one is 
wrapped in a radiance of colour. And 
one can only dream. For there is coral- 
pink, and there a wonderful green, "like 
the green light that lingers in the west/' 
and there is a blue as deep as the blue of 
a tropical sea; and there are green-blue 
and lustrous, ardent red. And the odd 
fantasy in the colouring, is not that like 
the fantasy in the temple of a dream ? For 
those who painted these capitals for the 
greater glory of Isis did not fear to de- 
part from nature, and to their patient wor- 
ship a blue palm perhaps seemed a rarely 
sacred thing. And that palm is part of 
the spell, and the reliefs upon the walls, 



"PHARAOH'S BED 



and even the Coptic crosses that are cut 
into the stone. 

But at the end, one can only say that 
this place is indescribable, and not because 
it is complex or terrifically grand, like 
Karnak. Go to it on a sunlit morning, 
or stand in it in late afternoon, and per- 
haps you will feel that it " suggests " you, 
that it carries you away, out of familiar 
regions into a land of dreams, where 
among hidden ways the soul is lost in 
magic. Yes, you are gone. 

To the right — for one, alas ! cannot live 
in a dream for ever — is a lovely doorway 
through which one sees the river. Facing 
it is another doorway, showing a frag- 
ment of the poor, vivisected island, some 
ruined walls, and still another doorway 
in which, again, is framed the Nile. 
Many people have cut their names upon 
the walls of Philae. Once, as I sat alone 
there, I felt strongly attracted to look up- 
ward to a wall, as if some personality, en- 
shrined within the stone, were watching 



234 "PHARAOH'S BED" 

me, or calling. I looked, and saw written 
" Balzac." 

Philae is the last temple that one visits 
before he gives himself to the wildness 
of the solitudes of Nubia. It stands at 
the very frontier. As one goes up the 
Nile, it is like a smiling adieu from the 
Egypt one is leaving. As one comes down, 
it is like a smiling welcome. In its deli- 
cate charm I feel something of the charm 
of the Egyptian character. There are 
moments, indeed, when I identify Egypt 
with Philse. For in Philae one must 
dream; and on the Nile, too, one must 
dream. And always the dream is happy, 
and shot through with radiant light — 
light that is as radiant as the colours in 
Phike's temple. The pylons of Ptolemy 
smile at you as you go up or come down 
the river. And the people of Egypt smile 
as they enter into your dream. A suavity, 
too, is theirs. I think of them often as 
artists, who know their parts in the 
dream-play, who know exactly their func- 



"PHARAOH'S BED" 235 



tion, and how to fulfil it rightly. They 
sing, while you are dreaming, but it is an 
under-song, like the murmur of an East- 
ern river far off from any sea. It never 
disturbs, this music, but it helps you in 
your dream. And they are softly gay. 
And in their eyes there is often the gleam 
of sunshine, for they are the children — 
but not grown men — of the sun. That, 
indeed, is one of the many strange things 
in Egypt — the youthfulness of its age, 
the childlikeness of its almost terrible an- 
tiquity. One goes there to look at the old- 
est things in the world and to feel perpet- 
ually young — young as Phibe is young, 
as a lyric of Shelley's is young, as all of 
our day-dreams are young, as the peo- 
ple of Egypt are young. 

Oh, that Egypt could be kept as it is, 
even as it is now ; that Philae could be pre- 
served even as it is now! The spoilers 
are there, those blithe modern spirits, so 
frightfully clever and capable, so indus- 
trious, so determined, so unsparing of 



236 "PHARAOH'S BED" 



themselves and — of others ! Already they 
are at work "benefiting Egypt/' Tall 
chimneys begin to vomit smoke along the 
Nile. A damnable tram-line for little 
trolleys leads one toward the wonderful 
Colossi of Memnon. Close to Kom Om- 
bos some soul imbued with romance has 
had the inspiration to set up — a factory! 
And Philse — is it to go? 

Is beauty then of no value in the 
world? Is it always to be the prey of 
modern progress? Is nothing to be con- 
sidered sacred; nothing to be left un- 
touched, unsmirched by the grimy fin- 
gers of improvement? I suppose noth- 
ing. 

Then let those who still care to dream 
go now to Philae's painted chamber by the 
long reaches of the Nile; go on, if they 
will, to the giant forms of Abu-Simbel 
among the Nubian sands. And perhaps 
they will think with me, that in some 
dreams there is a value greater than the 
value that is entered in any bank-book, 



"PHARAOH'S BED" 237 

and they will say, with me, however use- 
lessly : 

" Leave to the world some dreams, some 
places in which to dream; for if it needs 
dams to make the grain grow in the 
stretches of land that were barren, and 
railways and tram-lines, and factory 
chimneys that vomit black smoke in the 
face of the sun, surely it needs also 
painted chambers of Philae and the silence 
that comes down from Isis." 



OLD CAIRO 



XVIII 



OLD CAIRO 

By Old Cairo I do not mean only le vieux 
Caire of the guide-book, the little, deso- 
late village containing the famous Coptic 
church of Abu Sergius, in the crypt of 
which the Virgin Mary and Christ are 
said to have stayed when they fled to the 
land of Egypt to escape the fury of King 
Herod ; but the Cairo that is not new, that 
is not dedicated wholly to officialdom and 
tourists, that, in the midst of changes and 
the advance of civilisation — civilisation 
that does so much harm as well as so much 
good, that showers benefits with one hand 
and defaces beauty with the other — pre- 
serves its immemorial calm or immemor- 
ial tumult; that stands aloof, as stands 
aloof ever the Eastern from the Western 
241 



242 



OLD CAIRO 



man, even in the midst of what seems, 
perhaps, like intimacy; Eastern to the 
soul, though the fantasies, the passions, 
the vulgarities, the brilliant ineptitudes of 
the West beat about it like waves about 
some unyielding wall of the sea. 

When I went back to Egypt, after a 
lapse of many years, I fled at once from 
Cairo, and upon the long reaches of the 
Nile, in the great spaces of the Libyan 
Desert, in the luxuriant palm-grooves of 
the Fayyum, among the tamarisk-bushes 
and on the pale waters of Kurun, I forgot 
the changes which, in my brief glimpse 
of the city and its environs, had moved 
me to despondency. But one cannot live 
in the solitudes for ever. And at last 
from Madi-nat-al-Fayyum, with the first 
pilgrims starting for Mecca, I returned 
to the great city, determined to seek in it 
once more for the fascinations it used to 
hold, and perhaps still held in the hidden 
ways where modern feet, nearly always 
in a hurry, had seldom time to penetrate. 



OLD CAIRO 



243 



A mist hung over the land. Out of it, 
with a sort of stern energy, there came to 
my ears loud hymns sung by the pilgrim 
voices — hymns in which, mingled with the 
enthusiasm of devotees en route for the 
holiest shrine of their faith, there seemed 
to sound the resolution of men strung 
up to confront the fatigues and the dan- 
gers of a great journey through a wild 
and unknown country. Those hymns led 
my feet to the venerable mosques of 
Cairo, the city of mosques, guided me on 
my lesser pilgrimage among the cupolas 
and the colonnades, where grave men 
dream in the silence near marble foun- 
tains, or bend muttering their prayers be- 
neath domes that are dimmed by the ruth- 
less fingers of Time. In the buildings 
consecrated to prayer and to meditation 
I first sought for the magic that still lurks 
in the teeming bosom of Cairo. 

Long as I had sought it elsewhere, in 
the brilliant bazaars by day, and by night 
in the winding alleys, where the dark- 



244 



OLD CAIRO 



eyed Jews looked stealthily forth from the 
low-browed doorways; where the Circas- 
sian girls promenade, gleaming with 
golden coins and barbaric jewels; where 
the air is alive with music that is feverish 
and antique, and in strangely lighted in- 
teriors one sees forms clad in brilliant 
draperies, or severely draped in the sim- 
plest pale-blue garments, moving in lan- 
guid dances, fluttering painted figures, 
bending, swaying, dropping down, like the 
forms that people a dream. 

In the bazaars is the passion for gain, 
in the alleys of music and light is the pas- 
sion for pleasure, in the mosques is the 
passion for prayer that connects the souls 
of men with the unseen but strongly felt 
world. Each of these passions is old, each 
of these passions in the heart of Islam is 
fierce. On my return to Cairo I sought 
for the hidden fire that is magic in the 
dusky places of prayer. 

A mist lay over the city as I stood in 
a narrow byway, and gazed up at a heavy 



OLD CAIRO 



245 



lattice, of which the decayed and black- 
ened wood seemed on guard before some 
tragic or weary secret. Before me was 
the entrance to the mosque of Ibn-Tulun, 
older than any mosque in Cairo save only 
the mosque of Amru. It is approached 
by a flight of steps, on each side of which 
stand old, impenetrable houses. Above 
my head, strung across from one house to 
the other, were many little red and yel- 
low flags ornamented with gold lozenges. 
These were to bear witness that in a 
couple of days' time, from the great open 
place beneath the citadel of Cairo, the 
Sacred Carpet was to set out on its long 
journey to Mecca. My guide struck on 
a door and uttered a fierce cry. A small 
shutter in the blackened lattice was 
opened, and a young girl, with kohl- 
tinted eyelids, and a brilliant yellow hand- 
kerchief tied over her coarse black hair, 
leaned out, held a short parley, and van- 
ished, drawing the shutter to behind her. 
The mist crept about the tawdry flags, a 



246 



OLD CAIRO 



heavy door creaked, whined on its hinges, 
and from the house of the girl there came 
an old, fat man bearing a mighty key. In 
a moment I was free of the mosque of 
Ibn-Tulun. 

I ascended the steps, passed through a 
doorway, and found myself on a piece of 
waste ground, flanked on the right by an 
old, mysterious wall, and on the left by 
the long wall of the mosque, from which 
close to me rose a grey, unornamented 
minaret, full of the plain dignity of unpre- 
tending age. Upon its summit was 
perched a large and weary-looking bird 
with draggled feathers, which remained 
so still that it seemed to be a sad orna- 
ment set there above the city, and watch- 
ing it for ever with eyes that could not 
see. At right angles, touching the 
mosque, was such a house as one can see 
only in the East — fantastically old, fan- 
tastically decayed, bleared, discoloured, 
filthy, melancholy, showing hideous win- 
dows, like windows in the slum of a town 



OLD CAIRO 



247 



set above coal-pits in a colliery district, a 
degraded house, and yet a house which 
roused the imagination and drove it to its 
work. In this building once dwelt the 
High Priest of the mosque. This dwell- 
ing, the ancient wall, the grey minaret 
with its motionless bird, the lamentable 
waste ground at my feet, prepared me 
rightly to appreciate the bit of old Cairo 
I had come to see. 

People who are bored by Gothic 
churches would not love the mosque of 
Ibn-Tulun. No longer is it used for wor- 
ship. It contains no praying life. Aban- 
doned, bare, and devoid of all lovely orna- 
ment, it stands like some hoary patriarch, 
naked and calm, waiting its destined end 
without impatience and without fear. It 
is a fatalistic mosque, and is impressive, 
like a fatalistic man. The great court of 
it, three hundred feet square, with pointed 
arches supported by piers, double, and on 
the side looking toward Mecca quintuple 
arcades, has a great dignity of sombre 



248 



OLD CAIRO 



simplicity. Not grace, not a light ele- 
gance of soaring beauty, but massiveness 
and heavy strength are the distinguish- 
ing features of this mosque. Even the oc- 
tagonal basin and its protecting cupola 
that stand in the middle of the court 
lack the charm that belongs to so many of 
the fountains of Cairo. There are two 
minarets, the minaret of the bird, and a 
larger one, approached by a big stairway 
up which, so my dragoman told me, a Sul- 
tan whose name I have forgotten loved 
to ride his favourite horse. Upon the 
summit of this minaret I stood for a long 
time, looking down over the city. 

Grey it was that morning, almost as 
London is grey; but the sounds that came 
up softly to my ears out of the mist were 
not the sounds of London. Those many 
minarets, almost like columns of fog ris- 
ing above the cupolas, spoke to me of the 
East even upon this sad and sunless morn- 
ing. Once from where I was standing at 
the time appointed went forth the call to 



OLD CAIRO 



249 



prayer, and in the barren court beneath 
me there were crowds of ardent worship- 
pers. Stern men paced upon the huge ter- 
race just at my feet fingering their beads, 
and under that heavy cupola were made 
the long ablutions of the faithful. But 
now no man comes to this old place, no 
murmur to God disturbs the heavy silence. 
And the silence, and the emptiness, and 
the greyness under the long arcades, all 
seem to make a tremulous proclamation; 
all seem to whisper, " I am very old, I 
am useless, I cumber the earth." Even 
the mosque of Amru, which stands also 
on ground that looks gone to waste, near 
dingy and squat houses built with grey 
bricks, seems less old than this mosque of 
Ibn-Tulun. For its long fagade is striped 
with white and apricot, and there are leb- 
bek-trees growing in its court near the 
two columns between which if you can 
pass you are assured of heaven. But the 
mosque of Ibn-Tulun, seen upon a sad 
day, makes a powerful impression, and 



250 



OLD CAIRO 



from the summit of its minaret you are 
summoned by the many minarets of Cairo 
to make the pilgrimage of the mosques, 
to pass from the " broken arches " of 
these Saracenic cloisters to the " Blue 
Mosque/' the " Red Mosque/' the mosques 
of Mohammed Ali, of Sultan Hassan, of 
Kait Bey, of El-Azhar, and so on to the 
Coptic church that is the silent centre of 
" old Cairo/' It is said that there are 
over four hundred mosques in Cairo. As 
I looked down from the minaret of Ibn- 
Tulun, they called me through the mist 
that blotted completely out all the sur- 
rounding country, as if it would concen- 
trate my attention upon the places of 
prayer during these holy days when the 
pilgrims were crowding in to depart with 
the Holy Carpet. And I went down by 
the staircase of the house, and in the mist 
I made my pilgrimage. 

As every one who visits Rome goes to 
St. Peter's, so every one who visits Cairo 
goes to the mosque of Mohammed Ali in 



OLD CAIRO 



251 



the citadel, a gorgeous building in a mag- 
nificent situation, the interior of which 
always makes me think of Court func- 
tions, and of the pomp of life, rather than 
of prayer and self-denial. More attrac- 
tive to me is the " Blue Mosque/' to which 
I returned again and again, enticed almost 
as by the fascination of the living blue of 
a summer sky. 

This mosque, which is the mosque of 
Ibrahim Aga, but which is familiarly 
known to its lovers as the " Blue Mosque/' 
lies to the left of a ramshackle street, and 
from the outside does not look specially 
inviting. Even when I passed through 
its door, and stood in the court beyond, 
at first I felt not its charm. All looked 
old and rough, unkempt and in confusion. 
The red and white stripes of the walls 
and the arches of the arcade, the mean 
little place for ablution — a pipe and a row 
of brass taps — led the mind from a Nea- 
politan ice to a second-rate school, and 
for a moment I thought of abruptly re- 



252 



OLD CAIRO 



tiring and seeking more splendid pre- 
cincts. And then I looked across the court 
to the arcade that lay beyond, and I saw 
the exquisite " love-colour " of the mar- 
vellous tiles that gives this mosque its 
name. 

The huge pillars of this arcade are 
striped and ugly, but between them shone, 
with an ineffable lustre, a wall of purple 
and blue, of purple and blue so strong 
and yet so delicate that it held the eyes 
and drew the body forward. If ever col- 
our calls, it calls in the blue mosque of 
Ibrahim Aga. And when I had crossed 
the court, when I stood beside the pulpit, 
with its delicious, wooden folding-doors, 
and studied the tiles of which this won- 
derful wall is composed, I found them as 
lovely near as they are lovely far off. 
From a distance they resemble a Nature 
effect, are almost like a bit of Southern 
sea or of sky, a fragment of gleaming 
Mediterranean seen through the pillars 
of a loggia, or of Sicilian blue watching 



OLD CAIRO 



253 



over Etna in the long summer days. 
When one is close to them, they are a mir- 
acle of art. The background of them is 
a milky white upon which is an elaborate 
pattern of purple and blue, generally con- 
ventional and representative of no known 
object, but occasionally showing tall trees 
somewhat resembling cypresses. But it is 
impossible in words adequately to describe 
the effect of these tiles, and of the tiles 
that line to the very roof the tomb-house 
on the right of the court. They are like 
a cry of ecstasy going up in this otherwise 
not very beautiful mosque; they make it 
unforgetable, they draw you back to it 
again and yet again. On the darkest day 
of winter they set something of summer 
there. In the saddest moment they pro- 
claim the fact that there is joy in the 
world, that there was joy in the hearts of 
creative artists years upon years ago. If 
you are ever in Cairo, and sink into de- 
pression, go to the " Blue Mosque " and 
see if it does not have upon you an uplift- 



254 OLD CAIRO 



ing moral effect. And then, if you like, 
go on from it to the Gamia El Movayad, 
sometimes called El Ahmar, " The Red/' 
where you will find greater glories, though 
no greater fascination; for the tiles 
hold their own among all the wonders of 
Cairo. 

Outside the " Red Mosque/' by its im- 
posing and lofty wall, there is always an 
assemblage of people, for prayers go up 
in this mosque, ablutions are made there, 
and the floor of the arcade is often covered 
with men studying the Koran, calmly 
meditating, or prostrating themselves in 
prayer. And so there is a great coming 
and going up the outside stairs and 
through the wonderful doorway : beggars 
crouch under the wall of the terrace; the 
sellers of cakes, of syrups and lemon- 
water, and of the big and luscious water- 
melons that are so popular in Cairo, dis- 
play their wares beneath awnings of 
orange-coloured sackcloth, or in the full 
glare of the sun, and, their prayers com- 



OLD CAIRO 



255 



fortably completed or perhaps not yet be- 
gun, the worshippers stand to gossip, or 
sit to smoke their pipes, before going on 
their way into the city or the mosque. 
There are noise and perpetual movement 
here. Stand for a while to gain an im- 
pression from them before you mount the 
steps and pass into the spacious peace be- 
yond. 

Orientals must surely revel in contrasts. 
There is no tumult like the tumult in cer- 
tain of their market-places. There is no 
peace like the peace in certain of their 
mosques. Even without the slippers care- 
fully tied over your boots you would walk 
softly, gingerly, in the mosque of El Mo- 
vayad, the mosque of the columns and the 
garden. For once within the door you 
have taken wings and flown from the city, 
you are in a haven where the most 
delicious calm seems floating like an 
atmosphere. Through a lofty colonnade 
you come into the mosque, and find your- 
self beneath a magnificently ornamental 



256 



OLD CAIRO 



wooden roof, the general effect of which 
is of deep brown and gold, though there 
are deftly introduced many touches of 
very fine red and strong, luminous blue. 
The walls are covered with gold and su- 
perb marbles, and there are many quota- 
tions from the Koran in Arab lettering 
heavy with gold. The great doors are of 
chiselled bronze and of wood. In the dis- 
tance is a sultan's tomb, surmounted by 
a high and beautiful cupola, and pierced 
with windows of jewelled glass. But the 
attraction of this place of prayer comes 
less from its magnificence, from the shin- 
ing of its gold, and the gleaming of its 
many-coloured marbles, than from its spa- 
ciousness, its airiness, its still seclusion, 
and its garden. Mohammedans love foun- 
tains and shady places, as can surely love 
them only those who carry in their minds 
a remembrance of the desert. They love to 
have flowers blowing beside them while 
they pray v And with the immensely high 
and crenelated walls of this mosque long 



OLD CAIRO 



*57 



ago they set a fountain of pure white mar- 
ble, covered it with a shelter of limestone, 
and planted trees and flowers about it. 
There beneath palms and tall eucalyptus- 
trees even on this misty day of the 
winter, roses were blooming, pinks scented 
the air, and great red flowers, that looked 
like emblems of passion, stared upward 
almost fiercely, as if searching for the 
sun. As I stood there among the wor- 
shippers in the wide colonnade, near the 
exquisitely carved pulpit in the shadow 
of which an old man who looked like 
Abraham was swaying to and fro and 
whispering his prayers, I thought of 
Omar Khayyam and how he would have 
loved this garden. But instead of water 
from the white marble fountain, he would 
have desired a cup of wine to drink be- 
neath the boughs of the sheltering trees. 
And he could not have joined without 
doubt or fear in the fervent devotions of 
the undoubting men, who came here to 
steep their wills in the great will that 



2 5 8 



OLD CAIRO 



flowed about them like the ocean about 
little islets of the sea. 

From the " Red Mosque " I went to the 
great mosque of El-Azhar, to the wonder- 
ful mosque of Sultan Hassan, which un- 
fortunately was being repaired and could 
not be properly seen, though the examina- 
tion of the old portal covered with silver, 
gold, and brass, the general colour-effect 
of which is a delicious dull green, repaid 
me for my visit, and to the exquisitely 
graceful tomb-mosque of Kait Bey, which 
is beyond the city walls. But though I 
visited these, and many other mosques 
and tombs, including the tombs of the 
Khalifas, and the extremely smart mod- 
ern tombs of the family of the present 
Khedive of Egypt, no building dedicated 
to worship, or to the cult of the dead, left 
a more lasting impression upon my mind 
than the Coptic church of Abu Sergius, 
or Abu Sargah, which stands in the deso- 
late and strangely antique quarter called 
"Old Cairo." Old indeed it seems, al- 



OLD CAIRO 



259 



most terribly old. Silent and desolate is 
it, untouched by the vivid life of the rich 
and prosperous Egypt of to-day, a place 
of sad dreams, a place of ghosts, a place 
of living spectres. I went to it alone. 
Any companion, however dreary, would 
have tarnished the perfection of the im- 
pression Old Cairo and its Coptic church 
can give to the lonely traveller. 

I descended to a gigantic door of palm- 
wood which was set in an old brick arch. 
This door upon the outside was sheeted 
with iron. When it opened, I left behind 
me the world I knew, the world that be- 
longs to us of to-day, with its animation, 
its impetus, its flashing changes, its sweep- 
ing hurry and " go." I stepped at once 
into, surely, some mouldering century 
long hidden in the dark womb of the for- 
gotten past. The door of palmwood 
closed, and I found myself in a sort of 
deserted town, of narrow, empty streets, 
beetling archways, tall houses built of 
grey bricks, which looked as if they had 



260 



OLD CAIRO 



turned gradually grey, as hair does on an 
aged head. Very, very tall were these 
houses. They all appeared horribly, al- 
most indecently, old. As I stood and 
stared at them, I remembered a story of 
a Russian friend of mine, a landed pro- 
prietor, on whose country estate dwelt a 
peasant woman who lived to be over a 
hundred. Each year when he came from 
Petersburg, this old woman arrived to sa- 
lute him. At last she was a hundred and 
four, and, when he left his estate for the 
winter, she bade him good-bye for ever. 
For ever! But, lo! the next year there 
she still was — one hundred and five years 
old, deeply ashamed and full of apologies 
for being still alive. M I cannot help it," 
she said. " I ought no longer to be here, 
but it seems I do not know anything. I 
do not know even how to die ! 99 The grey, 
tall houses of Old Cairo do not know how 
to die. So there they stand, showing their 
haggard f agades, which are broken by pro- 
truding, worm-eaten, wooden lattices not 



OLD CAIRO 



261 



unlike the shaggy, protuberant eyebrows 
which sometimes sprout above bleared 
eyes that have seen too much. No one 
looked out from these lattices. Was 
there, could there be, any life behind 
them? Did they conceal harems of cen- 
tenarian women with wrinkled faces, and 
corrugated necks and hands? Here and 
there drooped down a string terminating 
in a lamp covered with minute dust, that 
wavered in the wintry wind which stole 
tremulously between the houses. And the 
houses seemed to be leaning forward, as 
if they were fain to touch each other and 
leave no place for the wind, as if they 
would blot out the exiguous alleys so that 
no life should ever venture to stir through 
them again. Did the eyes of the Virgin 
Mary, did the baby eyes of the Christ 
Child, ever gaze upon these buildings? 
One could almost believe it. One could 
almost believe that already these build- 
ings were there when, fleeing from 
the wrath of Herod, Mother and Child 



262 



OLD CAIRO 



sought the shelter of the crypt of Abu 
Sargah. 

I went on, walking with precaution, 
and presently I saw a man. He was sit- 
ting collapsed beneath an archway, and 
he looked older than the world. He was 
clad in what seemed like a sort of cataract 
of multi-coloured rags. An enormous 
white beard flowed down over his 
shrunken breast. His face was a mass 
of yellow wrinkles. His eyes were closed. 
His yellow fingers were twined about a 
wooden staff. Above his head was drawn 
a patched hood. Was he alive or dead? 
I could not tell, and I passed him on tip- 
toe. And going always with precaution 
between the tall, grey houses and beneath 
the lowering arches, I came at last to the 
Coptic church. 

Near it, in the street, were several 
Copts — large, fat, yellow-skinned, appar- 
ently sleeping, in attitudes that made them 
look like bundles. I woke one up, and 
asked to see the church. He stared, 



OLD. CAIRO 263 



changed slowly from a bundle to a stand- 
ing man, went away and presently, return- 
ing with a key and a pale, intelligent- 
looking youth, admitted me into one of 
the strangest buildings it was ever my 
lot to enter. 

The average Coptic church is far less 
fascinating than the average mosque, but 
the church of Abu Sargah is like no other 
church that I visited in Egypt. Its aspect 
of hoary age makes it strangely, almost 
thrillingly impressive. Now and then, in 
going about the world, one comes across 
a human being, like the white-bearded 
man beneath the arch, who might be a 
thousand years old, two thousand, any- 
thing, whose appearance suggests that he 
or she, perhaps, was of the company 
which was driven out of Eden, but that 
the expulsion was not recorded. And now 
and then one happens upon a building that 
creates the same impression. Such a 
building is this church. It is known and 
recorded that more than a thousand years 



264 OLD CAIRO 



ago it had a patriarch whose name was 
Shenuti; but it is supposed to have been 
built long before that time, and parts of 
it look as if they had been set up at the 
very beginning of things. The walls are 
dingy and whitewashed. The wooden 
roof is peaked, with many cross-beams. 
High up on the walls are several small 
square lattices of wood. The floor is of 
discoloured stone. Everywhere one sees 
wood wrought into lattices, crumbling car- 
pets that look almost as frail and brittle 
and fatigued as wrappings of mummies, 
and worn-out matting that would surely 
become as the dust if one set his feet hard 
upon it. The structure of the building is 
basilican, and it contains some strange 
carvings of the Last Supper, the Nativity, 
and St. Demetrius. Around the nave 
there are monolithic columns of white 
marble, and one column of the red and 
shining granite that is found in such quan- 
tities at Assuan. There are three altars 
in three chapels facing toward the Bast. 



OLD CAIRO 



265 



Coptic monks and nuns are renowned for 
their austerity of life, and their almost 
fierce zeal in fasting and in prayer, and 
in Coptic churches the services are some- 
times so long that the worshippers, who 
are almost perpetually standing, use 
crutches for their support. In their 
churches there always seems to me to be 
a cold and austere atmosphere, far differ- 
ent from the atmosphere of the mosques 
or of any Roman Catholic church. It 
sometimes rather repels me, and generally 
makes me feel either dull or sad. But in 
this immensely old church of Abu Sargah 
the atmosphere of melancholy aids the 
imagination. 

In Coptic churches there is generally 
a great deal of woodwork made into lat- 
tices, and into the screens which mark the 
divisions, usually four, but occasionally 
five, which each church contains, and 
which are set apart for the altar, for the 
priests, singers, and ministrants, for the 
male portion of the congregation, and for 



266 



OLD CAIRO 



the women, who sit by themselves. These 
divisions, so different from the wide spa- 
ciousness and airiness of the mosques, 
where only pillars and columns partly 
break up the perspective, give to Coptic 
buildings an air of secrecy and of mys- 
tery, which, however, is often rather re- 
pellent than alluring. In the high wooden 
lattices there are narrow doors, and in the 
division which contains the altar the door 
is concealed by a curtain embroidered 
with a large cross. The Mohammedans 
who created the mosques showed marvel- 
lous taste. Copts are often lacking in 
taste, as they have proved here and there 
in Abu Sargah. Above one curious and 
unlatticed screen, near to a matted dais, 
droops a hideous banner, red, purple, and 
yellow, with a white cross. Peeping in, 
through an oblong aperture, one sees a 
sort of minute circus, in the form of a 
half-moon, containing a table with an ugly 
red-and-white striped cloth. There the 
Eucharist, which must be preceded by con- 



OLD CAIRO 



267 



fession, is celebrated. The pulpit is of 
rosewood, inlaid with ivory and ebony, 
and in what is called the " haikal-screen " 
there are some fine specimens of carved 
ebony. 

As I wandered about over the tattered 
carpets and the crumbling matting, under 
the peaked roof, as I looked up at the flat- 
roofed galleries, or examined the sculp- 
tures and ivory mosaics that, bleared by 
the passing of centuries, seemed to be fad- 
ing away under my very eyes, as upon 
every side I was confronted by the hoary 
wooden lattices in which the dust found 
a home and rested undisturbed, and as I 
thought of the narrow alleys of grey and 
silent dwellings through which I had come 
to this strange and melancholy " Temple 
of the Father/' I seemed to feel upon my 
breast the weight of the years that had 
passed since pious hands erected this 
home of prayer in which now no one was 
praying. But I had yet to receive an- 
other and a deeper impression of solem- 



268 



OLD CAIRO 



nity and heavy silence. By a staircase I 
descended to the crypt, which lies beneath 
the choir of the church, and there, sur- 
rounded by columns of venerable marble, 
beside an altar, I stood on the very spot 
where, according to tradition, the Virgin 
Mary soothed the Christ child to sleep in 
the dark night. And, as I stood there, I 
felt that the tradition was a true one, and 
that there indeed had stayed the wondrous 
Child and the Holy Mother long, how 
long ago. 

The pale, intelligent Coptic youth, who 
had followed me everywhere, and who 
now stood like a statue gazing upon me 
with his lustrous eyes, murmured in Eng- 
lish, " This is a very good place ; this most 
interestin' place in Cairo." 

Certainly it is a place one can never 
forget. For it holds in its dusty arms — 
what? Something impalpable, something 
ineffable, something strange as death, 
spectral, cold, yet exciting, something that 
seems to creep into it out of the distant 



OLD CAIRO 



269 



past and to whisper : " I am here. I am 
not utterly dead. Still I have a voice and 
can murmur to you, eyes and can regard 
you, a soul and can, if only for a moment, 
be your companion in this sad, yet sacred, 
place." 

Contrast is the salt, the pepper, too, of 
life, and one of the great joys of travel 
is that at will one can command contrast. 
From silence one can plunge into noise, 
from stillness one can hasten to move- 
ment, from the strangeness and the won- 
der of the antique past one can step into 
the brilliance, the gaiety, the vivid anima- 
tion of the present. From Babylon one 
can go to Bulak ; and on to Bab Zouweleh, 
with its crying children, its veiled women, 
its cake-sellers, its fruiterers, its tur- 
baned Ethiopians, its black Nubians, and 
almost fair Egyptians; one can visit the 
bazaars, or on a market morning spend 
an hour at Shareh-el-Gamaleyeh, watch- 
ing the disdainful camels pass, soft- 
footed, along the shadowy streets, and 



270 OLD CAIRO 



the flat-nosed African negroes, with their 
almost purple-black skins, their bulging 
eyes, in which yellow lights are caught, 
and their huge hands with turned-back 
thumbs, count their gains, or yell their 
disappointment over a bargain from 
which they have come out not victors, but 
vanquished. If in Cairo there are melan- 
choly, and silence, and antiquity, in Cairo 
may be found also places of intense ani- 
mation, of almost frantic bustle, of up- 
roar that cries to heaven. To Bulak still 
come the high-prowed boats of the Nile, 
with striped sails bellying before a fair 
wind, to unload their merchandise. From 
the Delta they bring thousands of pan- 
niers of fruit, and from Upper Egypt and 
from Nubia all manner of strange and 
precious things which are absorbed into 
the great bazaars of the city, and are sold 
to many a traveller at prices which, to put 
it mildly, bring to the sellers a good re- 
turn. For in Egypt if one leaves his 
heart, he leaves also not seldom his skin. 



OLD CAIRO 



271 



The goblin men of the great goblin mar- 
ket of Cairo take all, and remain unsatis- 
fied and calling for more. I said, in a 
former chapter, that no fierce demands 
for money fell upon my ears. But I con- 
fess, when I said it, that I had forgotten 
certain bazaars of Cairo. 

But what matters it? He who has 
drunk Nile water must return. The 
golden country calls him; the mosques 
with their marble columns, their blue tiles, 
their stern-faced worshippers ; the narrow 
streets with their tall houses, their lat- 
ticed windows, their peeping eyes looking 
down on the life that flows beneath and 
can never be truly tasted; the Pyramids 
with their bases in the sand and their 
pointed summits somewhere near the 
stars ; the Sphinx with its face that is like 
the enigma of human life; the great river 
that flows by the tombs and the temples ; 
the great desert that girdles it with a 
golden girdle. 

Egypt calls — even across the space of 



272 OLD CAIRO 

the world; and across the space of the 
world he who knows it is ready to come, 
obedient to its summons, because in thrall 
to the eternal fascination of the " land of 
sand, and ruins, and gold " ; the land of 
the charmed serpent, the land of the after- 
glow, that may fade away from the sky 
above the mountains of Libya, but that 
fades never from the memory of one who 
has seen it from the base of some great 
column, or the top of some mighty pylon ; 
the land that has a spell — wonderful, 
beautiful Egypt. 

TH« END. 



DEC 14 1911 



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